Cast and Characters (Body Double) Body Double
Principal Cast
Jake Scully — Craig Wasson (in Body Double, as actor)
The film's protagonist, a struggling B-movie actor whose claustrophobia loses him the Vampire's Kiss role inside the opening minutes — the coffin scene freeze, the on-set firing, the confrontation with Rubin that ends with him thrown out.b1 b10 b11 Wasson plays Jake as passive and easily led, a man who accepts a stranger's offer of a free apartment and slides into obsession with a woman he watches through a telescope. Brian De Palma (in Body Double, as director) mirrors Rear Window but replaces Jimmy Stewart's confident professional with someone whose desperation makes him the perfect mark, too grateful to question the setup. De Palma discovered Wasson 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 (in Body Double, as actor)
Jake's seeming benefactor, the man who lends him an apartment with a telescope view of a beautiful neighbor.b7 b8 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. Henry's job is to make calculated manipulation feel like kindness, each offer of hospitality another piece of the trap clicking into place.
Holly Body — Melanie Griffith (in Body Double, as actor)
A porn actress hired to perform the erotic dance in Gloria's window, unknowingly serving as bait to keep Jake watching.b28 Griffith plays Holly as blunt and funny, sharper than anyone else in the film; she is the one character who never lies to Jake, her directness cutting through the layers of performance that surround him. 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, known at the time for playing Mandy Winger on Dallas, then found her voice unsuitable during editing and had actress Helen Shaver dub all of Shelton's dialogue without credit. The dubbing underlines De Palma's thesis about the role: Gloria exists as an image in a lens, literally voiceless, her identity replaced at every level by someone else's performance. That erasure is the film's point about what voyeurism does to the person being watched. (wikipedia)
Rubin — Dennis Franz (in Body Double, as actor)
The director of Vampire's Kiss, the low-budget horror production that opens and closes Body Double — first the coffin scene where Jake freezes and is fired, then the shower scene at the end where Jake completes the take and the body-double substitution process (Mindy stepping in for the lead actress's breast shot, Holly Body seated dressed-up behind Rubin's chair) plays out under the credits.b1 b11 b40 Franz plays Rubin as loud, profane, and impatient — wardrobe and beard echoing De Palma's own on-set look, in what De Palma later acknowledged was a deliberate self-portrait. Franz had already appeared in The Fury, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and Scarface and would go on to play Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue (1993–2005). See Dennis Franz (Body Double).
Corso — the porn director Jake auditions for
The director of Body Talk, the porn film Jake auditions for in the second act in order to find Holly Body.b23 b25 Corso runs his set with the same impatient professionalism Rubin runs his — the structural rhyme between the two director-actor encounters carries the film's argument that mainstream and adult production are the same enterprise more sharply than any single line of dialogue.
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 (in Body Double, as composer) was scoring his fifth De Palma film. Editor Jerry Greenberg had cut Dressed to Kill and Scarface; his assistant Bill Pankow, 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, spotted by De Palma in an episode of Skag. Stephen Burum (in Body Double, as cinematographer) 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. Bauer himself has a cameo in the finished film.
De Palma rarely worked with strangers. He recycled collaborators across films and promoted from within, advancing Pankow from assistant to editor and Henry from one-liner to lead. When he went outside the circle, he found people through adjacent networks, each new hire vouched for by someone already inside. 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 |