Cast and Characters (Body Double) Body Double
Principal Cast
Jake Scully — Craig Wasson
The film's protagonist, a struggling B-movie actor with severe claustrophobia. Wasson plays Jake as passive and easily led — he accepts a stranger's offer of a free apartment and becomes obsessed with a woman he watches through a telescope. De Palma mirrors Rear Window but swaps out Jimmy Stewart's confident professional for a man whose desperation makes him the perfect mark. De Palma and Wasson had no prior working relationship — De Palma discovered him through a two-part episode of the television series Skag (1980), starring Karl Malden, in which Wasson played Malden's oldest son. See Craig Wasson.
Sam Bouchard — Gregg Henry
Jake's seeming benefactor, who lends him an apartment with a telescope view of a beautiful neighbor. Henry keeps Sam friendly and solicitous, always a shade too helpful — on a second viewing, every generous gesture registers as stage management. Sam designed the murder plot, and Henry's job is to make the setup feel like kindness.
Holly Body — Melanie Griffith
A porn actress hired to perform the erotic dance in Gloria's window, unknowingly serving as bait to keep Jake watching. Griffith plays Holly as blunt, funny, and sharper than anyone else in the film — she's the one character who doesn't lie to Jake. De Palma cast Griffith partly because her mother, Tippi Hedren, starred in Hitchcock's The Birds and Marnie, folding real Hollywood lineage into a film built on Hitchcock quotations. See Melanie Griffith.
Gloria Revelle — Deborah Shelton
The woman Jake watches through the telescope. De Palma originally wanted Dutch actress Sylvia Kristel (Emmanuelle) for the role, but she was unavailable. He cast Shelton, who was known at the time for playing Mandy Winger on Dallas, but found her voice unsuitable during editing and had actress Helen Shaver dub all of Shelton's dialogue without credit. The result underlines De Palma's thesis about the role: Gloria exists as an image in a lens, literally voiceless, which is the film's point about what voyeurism does to the person being watched. (wikipedia)
Rubin — Dennis Franz (Body Double)
The director of the vampire film where Jake works, and later the porn film where Jake tracks down Holly. Franz plays Rubin as loud, profane, and completely unbothered by the industry he works in — a working director who treats horror and pornography with the same professional indifference. Franz had already appeared in De Palma's Dressed to Kill and would go on to play Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue (1993–2005). See Dennis Franz (Body Double).
De Palma assembled Body Double from a tight professional network
By 1984, De Palma had spent a decade building an informal stock company, and Body Double drew from nearly all of it. Dennis Franz had appeared in four prior De Palma films (The Fury, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Scarface). Gregg Henry had a one-line part in Scarface that turned into the Body Double lead. Pino Donaggio was scoring his fifth De Palma film. Editor Jerry Greenberg had cut Dressed to Kill and Scarface; his assistant Bill Pankow, who had been moving up through the De Palma pipeline since Dressed to Kill, graduated to co-editor on Body Double. First AD Joe Napolitano had run the floor on Blow Out and Scarface.
The new blood came through specific channels. Craig Wasson was a television discovery — De Palma spotted him in an episode of Skag. Stephen Burum arrived through the Coppola orbit, having shot The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. Screenwriter Robert J. Avrech was found through a script about the Yom Kippur War that De Palma's agent circulated. Melanie Griffith came through her husband Steven Bauer's role in Scarface — and through a long chain of rejections that included Linda Hamilton, Jamie Lee Curtis, Carrie Fisher, and Tatum O'Neal. Even Bauer has a cameo in the finished film.
The pattern: De Palma rarely worked with strangers. He recycled collaborators across films, promoted from within (Pankow from assistant to editor, Henry from one-liner to lead), and when he went outside the circle, he found people through adjacent networks. Body Double was the convergence point for nearly everyone in De Palma's professional world circa 1984.
Supporting Cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Guy Boyd | Detective Jim McLean |
| David Haskell | Drama teacher |
| Rebecca Stanley | Kimberly Brecht (Jake's girlfriend) |
| Al Israel | Frankie |
| Douglas Warhit | Theater director |