The 22 greatest double-acts in cinema history

Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke

Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke have made nine films together, and apparently plan to do more due to a mysterious upcoming project of which no further details have been revealed. Linklater has clearly trusted Hawke with telling stories that will only benefit in the long-term; in addition to making three projects in the Before trilogy, which were filmed nine years apart, Hawke also joined the director’s ambitious 12-year process of making the coming-of-age drama Boyhood by filming new scenes every summer.

The actor seems game to do roles in whatever project Linklater has in mind, even if it’s only a cameo in films like Waking Life or Fast Food Nation. It’s perhaps a reward for cases like Blue Moon, in which he gave Hawke the role of his career as the embittered musician Lorenz Hart, which earned him his first Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actor’ in a leading role.

Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant

Alfred Hitchcock had many stars that he enjoyed working with, such as Grace Kelly and James Stewart; however, the ‘Master of Suspense’ had a particular affinity for Cary Grant, as he would even refuse to do some films without him. Grant’s sensibilities as a highly charismatic, sharp-witted actor made him a perfect fit for the type of high-concept thrillers that Hitchcock was best known for.

Despite being often hailed for his good looks, Grant was a much more dynamic actor than he was given credit for, and Hitchcock gave him opportunities to test his range in more subversive films like Notorious and Suspicion. At the same time, he also understood what Grant was best at, and even managed to get the reclusive star to get out of retirement in order to play a suave cat burglar in the heist adventure To Catch a Thief.

Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst

Sofia Coppola began her career behind the camera with The Virgin Suicides, which cast Kirsten Dunst at just the right moment in her career when she was beginning to be treated as more than a child star. It marked the unification of two similarly mannered artists who were willing to develop more complicated female characters than Hollywood was used to seeing at the time. Dunst’s performance was the key to Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, an initially polarising take on the French royal that has been accepted as a modern classic years after the mixed reviews it earned at the Cannes Film Festival.

Even The Beguiled, one of Coppola’s lesser films, has a great performance from Dunst, who seemingly understood what the tone should have been for the western remake. While it is unclear at this point whether the pair will actually move forward with the adaptation of The Bell Jar, Dunst tends to give her best performances when Coppola is involved.

Will Ferrell and John C Reilly

Will Ferrell had been such a breakout star on Saturday Night Live that it seemed impossible for him to find a partner who could match his hilarity, especially when his Old School co-star Vince Vaughn had chosen to align himself with Owen Wilson. John C Reilly may have been a more prestigious actor known for his performances in Paul Thomas Anderson films, but he and Ferrell became best friends and developed some of the most gut-busting moments of the 21st century.

While Reilly knocked it out of the park when he had a smaller role in the Ferrell comedy Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, the pair’s potential was unleashed when they made Step Brothers, a mean-spirited, uproarious satire of toxic masculinity that nearly became avant-garde in how unusual it was. Although the pair botched their attempt to make a Holmes & Watson film, Reilly did pop up for a great cameo in Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have become inseparable due to their lifelong friendship, which began when they were both cast in the British sitcom Spaced from director Edgar Wright. The trio would then work together on one of the greatest thematic trilogies of all-time, the Cornetto trilogy, which managed to lampoon zombie films with Shaun of the Dead, action thrillers with Hot Fuzz, and disaster blockbusters with The World’s End.

Outside of their work with Wright, Pegg and Forst also co-starred together in the underrated sci-fi comedy Paul, which felt like a reflection of their own friendship as film geeks. They also both got to fulfil a childhood dream of getting to work with Steven Spielberg when they lent their vocal talents to the director’s first animated film, The Adventures of Tin-Tin, in which they voiced a pair of bickering investigators.

Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan

Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan starred in three of the most monumental romantic comedies of all time, which are credited with inspiring nearly all future entries in the genre. Joe Versus the Volcano is a bizarre, high-concept dark comedy that earned its heart because of how genuine the chemistry between Hanks and Ryan was, and conversely, Sleepless in Seattle is a very sincere, borderline hokey dramedy that still hits like an emotional sledgehammer because of the vulnerability that its stars showed.

You’ve Got Mail is a fascinating product of its era as well; while one might think that a film named after an outdated form of instant messaging would feel out of touch, You’ve Got Mail was surprisingly prescient in examining the challenges of lovers being employed by rival companies. While Ryan hasn’t quite earned a successful comeback yet, an onscreen reunion with Hanks might be exactly what she needs to reclaim her career.

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have been best friends since childhood, and made history together when they became the youngest recipients ever of the Academy Award for ‘Best Original Screenplay’ for Good Will Hunting, which they both also starred in. The pair have gone on to have an amusing onscreen dynamic that was reflected in their several collaborations with writer/director Kevin Smith.

Damon and Affleck have taken their partnership to the next level thanks to their new production company, Artists Equity, which aims to offer more advantageous salaries to every member of the crew; its intention is to give young filmmakers the same opportunities that they had when they were first breaking into the industry. Artists Equity has now produced several films that Affleck and Damon have starred in together, including Air (which Affleck also directed) and The RIP.

Quentin Tarantino and Samuel L Jackson

Quentin Tarantino has had a close working relationship with many actors, including John Travolta, Christoph Waltz, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Kurt Russell, and Bruce Dern. However, Samuel L Jackson owes his entire career to him because of the amazing showcase role he was given as Jules in Pulp Fiction, as it instantly became one of the most iconic performances of all-time.

Pulp Fiction might be their most famous collaboration, but Jackson actually gives the best performance of his career in Jackie Brown, which is also the most underrated film that Tarantino has ever made. He was brilliantly cast against type as a villain in Django Unchained, and he gives one of the best monologues in any Tarantino film in the midst of a shocking plot twist at the end of the first act of the brutal revisionist western The Hateful Eight.

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall are the type of Hollywood power couple that embody the Golden Age of Hollywood, as it was a case where their onscreen chemistry was a reflection of real life. Bogart and Bacall were so perfect together in the World War II noir thriller To Have and Have Not that they married only a year later, and managed to sustain their relationship through three more collaborations together.

The Big Sleep, Key Largo, and Dark Passage are all among the most entertaining films of the ‘40s, but they’re elevated to a new level thanks to how dynamic the duo were together. Even though The Big Sleep in particular is a very confusing film that no one has quite managed to crack, its central romance is so authentically rendered that it’s easy to forgive some of the other narrative faults.

John Carpenter and Kurt Russell

John Carpenter is often called the ‘Master of Horror’ because he has directed many of the best scary movies of all time, but he’s also a massive western buff, having praised the work of Howard Hawks. It makes sense that his most serious collaborator would be Kurt Russell, who would go on to become a western icon after getting roles in films like Tombstone, based on the success of his work with Carpenter.

The pair ironically met while making a television film based on the life of Elvis Presley, but they would go on to make some of the defining genre films of the ‘80s, with Escape From New York a masterpiece of action, The Thing one of the greatest works of horror ever, and Big Trouble In Little China one of the cleverest parodies in contemporary Hollywood.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were one of the first great screen duos, and were essential to the era of silent film. Although they had their own respective careers on stage and vaudeville shows prior to working together for the first time in 1921, Laurel and Hardy would go on to appear in several comedy shorts before transitioning into features.

Attempts to break up the pair failed, as they had developed an offscreen friendship that lasted until the end of their lives. Unlike many other stars of the silent era, Laurel and Hardy were actually able to make the transition to talkies and find success. Those interested in the way that their lives intersected with each other should check out the Bafta-nominated biopic film Stan & Ollie, in which Laurel and Hardy are played by Steve Coogan and John C Reilly, respectively.

Bong Joon-ho and Song Kang-ho

Bong Joon-ho is easily the most famous South Korean director in the world, and one of the nation’s first filmmakers to break out to a global audience. He has worked with many actors over the years, but none have been as loyal as Song Kang-ho, the acclaimed Korean actor who also worked with the pair’s mutual friend, Park Chan-wook. Song is a truly chameleonic actor who was able to play a struggling father in The Host, a disgruntled detective in Memoirs of Murder, and a revolutionary in Snowpiercer, with equal precision

Bong’s film Parasite became the first international film to ever win the Academy Award for ‘Best Picture’, and the first South Korean film to win ‘Best International Feature’; suitably, it featured Song in what may be the single greatest performance of his career as the father within a family of con artists.

David Lynch and Kyle MacLachlan

David Lynch and Kyle MacLachlan had a rocky start to their collaborative relationship when they made Dune, a famously failed adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel. It thankfully did not dissuade them from working together, as it was only two years later that Lynch cast MacLachlan as the lead in his gothic masterpiece Blue Velvet, which skyrocketed both of their careers. Lynch gave MacLachlan his most beloved role ever when he cast him as Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, a series that became a cultural phenomenon and developed one of the most loyal fanbases ever.

Despite the show’s early cancellation, the actor came back to reprise his role in both the prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and the sequel series Twin Peaks: The Return. Sadly, he also revealed he had been planning to make something else with Lynch prior to his death, which we can only imagine would have given us another reason to love the duo.

Wes Anderson and Bill Murray

Wes Anderson is another director who has developed a cohort of actors whom he frequently works with, including Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, Ralph Fiennes, Bob Balaban, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, and Scarlett Johansson, but, most notably, he is responsible for launching the second era of Bill Murray’s career when he gave the legendary Ghostbusters star a key supporting role in Rushmore.

It was through Rushmore that Murray finally showed he was comfortable being the elder statesman of comedy, and agreed to take on smarts both big and small in nearly all of the films that Anderson has made since; even if he had brief appearances in The Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch, he was the titular character in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou. Although Murray has been notoriously prickly and often gets into feuds with his collaborators, he has credited Anderson as being the one filmmaker who truly understands him.

Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune

Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune have a nearly insurmountable catalogue of classics under their collective belt, as the pair has made 16 films together over the course of nearly two decades. That type of loyalty doesn’t come unless both members of the partnership are equally enamoured with one another, and Kurosawa was able to use Mifune to create some of the most striking characters in the history of cinema.

It was through Yojimbo, Kurosawa’s action masterpiece, that Mifune created an archetype of an enigmatic drifter that would inspire countless imitators, including Clint Eastwood’s role as ‘The Man With No Name’ in Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy of spaghetti western films. Mifune was also saddled with what is essentially the lead role in the ensemble action masterpiece Seven Samurai, and was cast against type to play a thoroughly nasty antagonist in Kurosawa’s highly influential mystery thriller Rashomon, nailing it both times and more.

Robert Redford and Paul Newman

Robert Redford and Paul Newman are perhaps the two most iconic movie stars of the ‘60s and ‘70s, as they were both associated with a sense of wholesome goodness and heroism. Redford and Newman were first cast together in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which is both a perfect western adventure and a distillation of what made their friendship so appealing.

The pair returned to make another film with director Michael Ritchie when they did the heist thriller The Sting, which both won the Academy Award for ‘Best Picture’ and became one of the highest-grossing releases in history. In the years that followed, the two would often work together through their mutual support of environmental groups and political causes. They planned to reunite for the film A Walk in the Woods, but it wasn’t made until after Newman’s death, and his role was taken up by Nick Nolte instead.

Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau

Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau appeared in an astounding 11 films together, with most of them being comedies. While they identified their personas quite astutely with The Odd Couple, which would easily become the most famous of their collaborative works, they also did roles in which they played against type, including The Front Page and Kotch. The pair were favoured by Billy Wilder, the brilliant writer-director who cast them as co-stars for the first time in The Fortune Cookie, for which Matthau won an Academy Award for playing a grumpy lawyer.

Despite the fact that their partnership began in 1966, the two managed to sustain the interest of younger generations when Grumpy Old Men and its sequel, Grumpier Old Men, became late-period hits. Lemmon had other memorable co-stars over the years, including Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot, but his chemistry with Matthau remained unmatched.

John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands

John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands are a rare example of a Hollywood couple that stayed together, despite the demanding nature of many of their films. Cassavetes was considered to be a breakthrough filmmaker in terms of his ability to conjure realistic emotions out of his stars, but it was Rowlands who best took advantage of his abilities by taking up all too incredibly challenging roles and playing them to perfection.

Rowlands’ performances in Cassavetes’ classics, particularly A Woman Under the Influence and Opening Night, are frequently cited as being some of the best performances in the history of the medium. However, the ten films that they made together also include some hidden gems; Faces is a film that has been re-assessed and given more credit than it was during its initial release window, and Gloria offered a major comeback for Rowlands that also earned her a surprise Oscar nomination.

John Ford and John Wayne

John Ford and John Wayne made 14 films together and are responsible for some of the most influential movements in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Nearly all westerns owe some degree of influence to Stagecoach, the monumental 1939 classic that essentially invented the genre and served as the first collaboration between the two. They would update and challenge the mythology of the American West with the devastating anti-hero story in The Searchers, the heartwarming spirituality of 3 Godfathers, the poignant romance of She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, and the political stickiness of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Their partnership wasn’t limited to the western, though, as Wayne also gave one of his most underrated performances as an Irish boxer in The Quiet Man, which earned Ford the last of his four wins for ‘Best Director’ at the Academy Awards.

Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro

Martin Scorsese has developed a highly successful partnership with Leonardo DiCaprio, but it has not quite reached the iconic status of his work with Robert De Niro. Scorsese first cast De Niro for a supporting role in his breakthrough film Mean Streets, but would later give him some of the best anti-hero roles of all-time with Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, Goodfellas, and Casino, among others.

Scorsese has admitted that De Niro came to his aid when he was facing the height of his addiction issues, and also helped him get through the anguish of shooting difficult films like The King of Comedy. Even though the former has spent the last two decades primarily working with DiCaprio, he returned to work with De Niro once more for the reflective gangster epic The Irishman and the devastating historical crime drama Killers of the Flower Moon.

Joel and Ethan Coen

Joel Coen and Ethan Coen are synonymous with a style of dark comedy, neo-western, and spiritual profundity that has been impossible to replicate. Collectively, the brothers have been making consistent masterpieces ever since their debut in 1983 with the thriller Blood Simple, and while some of their films together were instantly hailed as classics (such as Fargo and No Country for Old Men), others have lingered around longer and have been claimed as cult classics (including The Big Lebowski and Burn After Reading).

The Coens made a perfect final statement as filmmakers together with the anthology western The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which brought together six unique stories related to death. Since their split, Joel made the excellent Shakespearean adaptation The Tragedy of Macbeth with his wife Frances McDormand, and Ethan and his wife Tricia Cooke made the disastrous comedies Drive-Away Dolls and Honey’ Don’t!, proving that they do their best work together, or at least Ethan definitely does.

Steven Spielberg and John Williams

Steven Spielberg is cinema’s greatest mythmaker, and would be a popular choice to be declared the greatest director of all-time; however, a vast majority of his best work wouldn’t have been possible without the music of John Williams, who created such momentous cinematic moments as the track to the shark attack from Jaws, the reveal of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the flying bicycle in ET the Extra-Terrestrial, the Tyrannosaurus Rex’s appearance in Jurassic Park, or the breathtaking communication with flying saucers in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There’s not a movie fan out there who can’t hum Williams’ themes.

Williams won three of his five Academy Awards for ‘Best Original Score’ for doing the music for Spielberg films, and is set to reunite with the filmmaker for what might be their last collaboration with the highly-anticipated science fiction adventure Disclosure Day.