Your Costume Needs Work

The camera adds a few cup sizes.

Kid: Your Zuko costume's pretty good, but your scar's on the wrong side.
Zuko: The scar's not on the wrong side!

— Avatar: The Last Airbender, "The Ember Island Players"

This trope is when a celebrity, Super Hero with a Secret Identity, a magical, non-human creature, etc. is mistaken for an impersonation of themselves, and furthermore, criticized or laughed at for their lame "costume".

Picture this: Elvis really is Not Quite Dead after all. He decides to surprise the world by showing up at one of those Elvis Impersonator conventions in full iconic Elvis regalia. What does he hear when he shows up? His outfit is the poorest recreation anyone has ever seen, his accent sounds totally fake, his hair style is all wrong, and he's much too tall. Nice try, newbie, but you would never pass as the real Elvis.

May be evoked in Clark Kenting. Yes, this does happen in Real Life because Reality Is Unrealistic. Also, performers who are going to work have cosmetics and costume people to get them ready to look good under the bright lights, compared to whatever day-to-day clothes they wear to go shopping.

A contributing factor is that impersonations are usually not judged on how much they look and act like the real celebrity in general, but how faithfully they can recreate a small number of recorded performances. Those same recordings are available for the impersonator to rehearse with again and again, whereas for the real Elvis, that performance was only one out of hundreds in his career. Many of the small details in the canonical recording that the impersonators lovingly reproduce would be unimportant accidents to the real performer, or at best just one point on an entire scale of ways they can perform.

Not to be confused with Cheap Costume or Beta Outfit. Also see Recognition Failure, Mistaken for Clown and Genuine Imposter. This might lead to the "impersonator" explaining that Actually, I Am Him.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Played with in Slayers - When they temporarily join a company of traveling actors, Lina and Gourry are given a bit part as the dragon, while Amelia is asked to play the hero. The name of the play? "Bring Us Justice and Peace: The Death of the Abominable Fiend Lina Inverse."
• This happens to Gohan in Dragon Ball Z when he interrupts filming in a movie about the Great Saiyaman. The director and actors mistake him for a meddling stunt double. They only realize it's the real deal when, after being rejected, he flies away — dragging a huge crane behind him, no less.
  • Dragon Ball Super likewise had a mini-arc where they were making a "Great Saiyaman vs. Mr. Satan" movie, and Satan (who knows Gohan's identity) got him cast as the Saiyaman's stunt double so he could get at least some small recognition for his heroics; the rest of the cast and crew just assumed he was doing his nerdy son-in-law a favor.
• In the Inuyasha manga, chapter 520, Inuyasha shows up on a present-day Tokyo train as he usually appears, haori, sword, ears and hair and all. Some of the innocent bystanders think he is cosplaying, but say that he's not a very good cosplayer. This makes sense since not many manga exist inside their own worlds. So, even if it was Sesshoumaru in his brother's place, he could as well be given the same treatment (after all, some people do cosplays of their own Original Generation characters, which gives some bystanders the right to point flaws in them).
• Digimon:
  • Digimon Adventure: When Pumpkinmon and Gotsumon are kicked out of a pachinko place in "Out on the Town", the bouncer tells them that, if they're going to try sneaking in dressed as cartoon characters, they should at least try to get good costumes.
  • Digimon Tamers has Takato walking with Guilmon on the street at plain daylight. Nobody was alarmed because it was a real good life-size replica for a 10 year old. It's okay, a dinosaur that snorts, talks, walks and spits fireballs is just a basic project to do for your average 10 year old. We're in Japan, after all.
• Kotetsu runs into this in the 20th episode of Tiger & Bunny when trying to convince an Apollon Media security guard that he's Wild Tiger. The security guard notes that hero look-alikes try to sneak into the premises all the time, and he has no reason to believe that Kotetsu isn't just a convincing Wild Tiger cosplayer.
• In the dub of Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, Don Patch says he once won third place in a "Don Patch Look-alike" contest.
• Trigun: Vash the Stampede gets this a lot, thanks to his Obfuscating Stupidity and the over-the-top legend that has grown around him. In the movie Badlands Rumble, Vash attempts to use his reputation as an outlaw to avoid getting kicked out of a bar by Meryl. After a Beat, everyone in the bar bursts out laughing. It helps that the diminutive Meryl had just dragged him across the room by his ear, taking the impact away from anything he could've said. Vash greatly enjoys the mixup.
• Codename: Sailor V: This happens twice to Minako Aino:
  • The first time she was mistaken for an impersonator trying to advertise the Sailor V Game (it helped it was her first public appearance, with most people who knew of her having only seen her on the Sailor V Game machine);
  • The second time she had just kicked down a youma that had assaulted her school's festival, and the first thing one of the victims said after recovering was to ask who was the crazy girl wearing a fake Sailor V costume.
• Ya Boy Kongming!: Since Kongming refuses to wear anything other than his Three Kingdoms court robes and carries his trademark feather fan with him everywhere, this is most people's reaction upon seeing him. The general assumption is that he's just an eccentric who really enjoys dressing up as Kongming.
• Played with in episode 18 of S1 of Beyblade. Tyson returns home briefly after winning the Chinese Beyblade Tournament. When he sees that the local kids have picked up playing Beyblade, he comments on two girls beyblading. When asked who he is, they don't believe he's the real Tyson, commenting that the Tyson on TV is far cuter. However, in this case, it's justified as Tyson is set to head to America to compete in the American Tournament. Most people assumed he was already in America or heading there (Including his friends from his home town)and therefore he couldn;t be the real deal. This is subverted in V-Force were whenever any of the Bladebreakers talk with the kids in Tysons town,or whenever Tyson plays or partakes in local shop tournaments as celebrity challenger, the kids there immediately recognize them and are thrilled to meet/play against them.

Asian Animation

• In Season 3 episode 4 of Happy Heroes, to make a lie he told about the existence of a people on Planet Xing called the Blue Stars convincing, Smart S. hires someone to paint actors the necessary colors. When that person sees the partially blue-colored Monster of the Week, he thinks he's one of the actors and complains about the quality of his costume before the monster angrily shouts that it isn't a costume.

Comedy

• In the 1960s, one of Woody Allen's comedy routines was about him shooting a moose, which turns out to be unconscious rather than dead, and driving home with it. Realizing it's awake, he takes it to a costume party, claiming it's a couple in a moose suit... which is precisely who wins the Best Costume award, for which the actual moose comes in second.
• In one of his early comedy albums, Lewis Black tells the story of auditioning for the lead role in a sitcom based on his monologues, which was written precisely with him in mind as the lead. After an audition, the producers cast another actor in the role, thinking that Black playing himself wasn't authentic enough.
  "Unbeknownst to me, there was a better ME out there!"

Comic Books

• In The Sandman (1989) spinoff Death: At Death's Door, Death, a Perky Goth Anthropomorphic Personification, announces her identity to a group of departed souls, only for an unimpressed guy to dismiss her with, "You, and every goth chick in here!"
• Y: The Last Man: Having grown a beard on a cross-country train-ride, Yorick is given advice by a "working girl" (who assumes Yorick is a woman with a fake beard) to make it look more natural. More justified than usual in this case, as all of the men except Yorick are dead, so the "working girl" has every reason in the world to think he is a woman.
  "If you bind those breasts a little tighter, you'll almost be passable."
  "...Thanks?"
• Spider-Man:
  • In The Amazing Spider-Man (Lee & Ditko) #12, Spidey tries to save his then-girlfriend, Betty Brant, from Doctor Octopus while suffering from the flu. He is easily defeated and unmasked, with Ock beating him down with his bare hands... and his poor showing convinces Doc Ock, the hostage, and the other witnesses that he isn't Spider-Man but just Peter Parker making a brave but very foolish effort to save her.
  • Exploited by the webslinger in a later issue when someone needs to talk to him, and he takes them to chat over fries in a fairly public downtown diner. He's not remotely worried about being recognized as the real Spider-Man, and when his confidant questions this, Spidey provides a perfect demonstration:
    Spider-Man: (to the Fry cook) Hey, Sal! Tell this guy I'm the real Spider-Man. He doesn't believe me.
    Fry cook: (clearly humoring him) Yeah, yeah, buddy. You're the real Spider-Man. Whatever you say.
    Spider-Man: (to the witness) See?
• In a Barbie comic, the eponymous character (a Supermodel in her 'verse) used this as a running gag, usually with someone going "Is that Barbie, the famous model?" "Oh no she's too (tall/short/fat/skinny/whathaveyou) to be her!"
• A Jose Carioca story has Jose assuming he's guaranteed to win a Jose Carioca look-alike contest. He loses to Donald Duck. Speaking of Donald, this occasionally happens in Paperinik stories (Paperinik is Donald's Super Hero identity). Being smart, he uses this to make his Clark Kenting work.
• In Scare Tactics (DC Comics), Slither (a lizard boy) is refused admittance to a nightclub because:
  "Sorry kid, but there's a dress code here - and that green body paint is just too five minutes ago to cut it!"
• In Knights of the Dinner Table, Gary Jackson comes third in a Gary Jackson lookalike contest, probably as a Shout-Out to the famous Charlie Chaplin example discussed below.
• An episode of the Polish comic Kajko i Kokosz has both heroes, medieval Slavic warriors, transported to present day where they stumble into a movie set of a historical drama film about their adventures. The film's main characters are completely unlike them, and when someone suggests that the two strange-dressed arrivals might serve as stuntmen for the lead characters, the director laughs them off; after all, they look nothing like the "real" Kajko and Kokosz!
• The classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 1 starts this way; this was later adapted in the 2003 cartoon.
  Purple Dragon Thug: Nobody trespasses on Purple Dragon turf and gets away with it... especially when they're wearing stupid turtles costumes.
  Leonardo: He's wrong... We're not wearing costumes.
• Batman:
  • In a classic '70s era story, "The Batman Nobody Knows", Bruce Wayne takes some inner-city kids on a camping trip, and around the campfire, the subject of Batman comes up. As Bruce listens, the kids describe what they think Batman's like (one calls him a demon, another claims that he's Shaft-meets-Superfly). Bruce then emerges from the woods in his Batman costume, and the kids reply, "Yeah, nice costume, Mr. Wayne, but you ain't no Batman!" It's not so much that his costume needs work: at the end, Bruce wonders why he didn't get the reaction he intended. He realizes that it's because the kids are innocent, and they have nothing to fear from Batman.
  • Inverted in the third issue of Batman, Inc:
    "Why the hell is Batman masquerading as Bruce Wayne, anyway? I've met Wayne and you don't fool me."
  • Same thing happens in All-Star Batman #11, where the Penguin and his cohorts chide Batman for his supposedly subpar Bruce Wayne "disguise."
    Penguin: You can never get your Bruce Wayne quite right.
    Black Mask: It's the chin.
    Great White: That damn chin...
• In the Halloween issue of Li'l Gotham, a restaurant owner thinks Batman and Robin are cosplayers and offers advice on how to make their outfits more authentic.
• And in a late '70s Iron Man, Tony Stark goes "undercover" as Iron Man at the San Diego Comic Con. There are several other "Iron Men" there, and Tony takes some flak from fans of earlier revisions of the suit.
• In Dork Tower, Carson the Muskrat gets this from a bunch of costumed furries at a convention.
  "Worst muskrat costume EVER!"
  "HEY!"
  • This is probably also a Lampshade Hanging of Carson not looking much like a muskrat at all.
• In the 2008 DC Universe Halloween Special, when Superman beats Lois home and gives out candy to the night's first trick-or-treaters, one remarks "Wow... that has to be the worst Superman costume I've ever seen!"
• In Empowered the title character finds that the only job she can get is with a group of superhero impersonators impersonating herself. Nobody realizes that it's really her until she ends up having to save the group from several supervillains who had kidnapped them in order to blackmail the REAL superhero team. In this case, she really is wearing a poor replica of her real costume.
  • In a semi-related example, Major Havoc once wrote fanfiction about himself and posted it anonymously, figuring that nobody could get his character down better than the real deal. Cue several reader comments on how bad and unrealistic the characterization was, including one (which, on a reread, you realize is from Empowered's alter ego) claiming it "inexcusably ignores the Homoerotic Subtext that makes the Major such a compelling and intriguing subject."
• In Guardians Of The Globe, a man is offended to see someone dressed as El Chupacabra, a great hero, drinking himself blind at a bar. The drunk explains that he really is El Chupacabra... and the guy backs off, believing him entirely right away.
• In Echo, the trope is used. The crew take a break at a rest stop and inform the staff that they are there on government work. However, thanks to the body-warping Phi-project, Ivy is too young and Julie is too beautiful to be taken as government employees and Vijay, the new tagalong member of the gang, is Indian. The staff is now convinced they are serving M. Night Shyamalan and a movie crew, despite all claims to the contrary.
• Played with when The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers one day notice the fourth wall, discovering there's a comic strip starring them. They promptly decide on complete wardrobe makeovers to avoid association with the idiots on the printed page. That evening they find their local watering hole is holding a Freak Brothers lookalike contest with a cash prize, and can't find appropriate clothes.
• In All-Star Superman, Superman reveals his secret identity to Lois Lane, but she says his Clark Kent impression is really bad and keeps asking where the real Clark is.
  Superman: I wasn't impersonating Clark, I am Clark. Lois, why won't you believe me?
• One Halloween comic had a girl mistake Michael for her boyfriend, and comment on how stupid his costume makes him look.
• In the Doctor Who comic "The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who", the Eleventh Doctor falls into a parallel dimension where his adventures are a popular science fiction franchise, and he attends a Doctor Who convention trying to work out what happened to him. While there, people compliment him on his Cosplay (saying he even has the voice down), and one of the people he's attending the con with suggests he enter the Cosplay Contest. Cut to a similar-looking but earring-wearing cosplayer holding a First Place trophy while the real Doctor holds a Second Place one. His friend suggests it's because the other guy did more, whereas the real Doctor just stood there and pointed at himself for a few minutes, assuming that was all it needed.
• Invoked multiple times in some Diabolik special stories dealing with his Real Life fandom:
  • In one occasion a Diabolik exhibition has a model dressed as Eva come to the real Jaguar E-Type (the same model as Diabolik's car) exposed there and jumps on it, saying it's for realism. Then the baffled staff realizes it's the real Eva when she drives away with the car, because spare Jaguars don't come cheap (especially because it's out of production);
  • In one other occasion, Ginko is searching for Diabolik and Eva, who have committed a heist in the Italian city of Lucca during the local city-wide convention... And has to deal with thousands of people dressed in Diabolik's trademark body suit, as Diabolik has distributed free suits before committing the heist. In the meantime, Diabolik and Eva calmly waltz through the checks because they were wearing fattening versions of Diabolik's suit (Ginko realizes he's been had only when a cop asks him if they were giving away Diabolik's car too).
• In The Sensational She-Hulk #12, She-Hulk visits the set of a movie being made about her. Several people mistake her for an aspiring actress or stunt double, and criticize her "costume" and "make up".
• In Gwenpool Holiday Special: Merry Mixup, Deadpool stumbles upon a Halloween "Deadpool Costume Contest" full of pretend-Deadpools of varying believability. Predictably, he's mistaken for a poor impersonator. The contest is also hosted by Squirrel Girl, who's deliberately pretending to be dressed up as herself, and there's a guy dressed up as Leather Boy (the guy who killed Squirrel Girl's first sidekick, Monkey Joe) only to turn out to be the real deal (and attending so he can off her current sidekick, Tippy Toe, because he's frankly completely crazy). She's convinced that Deadpool's the real deal after he saves Tippy Toe, but since it wouldn't be fair to the impersonators who put in actual effort in their costumes, she gives him a "Minimum Effort" participation badge as reward instead.
• In the Laff-A-Lympics special "The Man Who Stole Thursday," Scooby-Doo and his teenage comrades are at a comic book convention searching for Tempus, the man behind the titular problem. A costumed conventioneer tells Shaggy that he has on the worst alien costume he's ever seen. Shaggy to the conventioneer: "Aw, go leap over a tall building in a single bound!"
• In PK2 issue #3, Donald (aka the titular Paperinik) improvises a Paperinik costume using a blue cloth and some maskara to negotiate with a brainwashed hobo holding him and some bystanders hostage. The bystanders note that he barely resembles Paperinik, but the hobo is actually tricked. Until he notices that the "cape" has a price tag.
• In Galactus #1, a spectator at an exhibit of Alicia Masters's work criticizes a "sculpture" of Silver Surfer, saying the jawline is all wrong. The Surfer tells the man he'll let Alicia know.
• The Simpsons Futurama Crossover Crisis: When Bender arrives at Moe's, Lenny, Carl, and Moe think he's just a guy wearing a robot suit instead of an actual robot.

Comic Strips

• U.S. Acres: Roy once dared Orson to dress like a bear.◊ When a real bear showed up, Roy said it was the worst bear suit he'd ever seen.
• The newspaper version of Spider-Man has Spidey apply to play himself in a movie. He's rejected without even an audition because he's too short. They change their mind when he performs some stunts that make it clear he's the real deal.

Fan Works

• In Amazing Fantasy, Peter gets mistaken for a Spider-Man impersonator instead of the real thing because Spider-Man is considered fictional in Izuku's universe. Because of this, the police refer to him as a "Spider-Man copycat" or a "Vigilante dressed as Spider-Man" and mistake his webshoosters for a web-producing Quirk despite people on site clearly seeing that he stopped a careening truck.
• In The Contest , a My Hero Academia fic, Deku enters a Deku lookalike comtest at a hero con and takes second. When told what’s wrong with his costume, he rambles on about how the belt is his con belt not his work belt and his isual headware is too bulky and he’s afraid of hitting someone with it if he wears it. Shouto spills the beans on who’s the real one after it ends.
• In the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf adaptation "The Smurf Impersonators", during the part of the story where Gargamel disguises himself as a Smurf, he tries to tell Sassette that he has been working on doing a perfect Gargamel impersonation to explain why he sounds like Gargamel. Sassette simply tells him that he doesn't sound quite as menacing as the real Gargamel.
• Inverted in Gaz's Horrible Halloween of Doom. While wearing a fairy princess costume on Halloween, Gaz gets kidnapped by a nutty paranormal investigator who mistakes her for a real fairy, specifically a "Sugar Fairy" that only comes out on Halloween.
• In the Homestuck fancomic Homeslice, in the Day of the Creators intermission, a Humble Salesperson confuses John, Rose, Dave and Jade for really accurate cosplayers with exquisite taste, and sells them merchandise themed after themselves.
• In the Young Avengers Amerikate fic "I don't wanna be your superman," Kate Bishop goes to a convention "cosplaying" in her actual Hawkeye outfit. She meets America Chavez, who makes a point of criticizing her costume. It turns out America knew who she was all along, but still considers it a terrible cosplay due to the total lack of effort.
• In the House Halloween fanfic "Imps" there is a Running Gag when people keep thinking Cuddy's Marlene Dietrich costume is meant to be a different blonde movie star (Marilyn Monroe or Mae West, for example).
• Discussed in Infinity Train: Voyage of Wisteria. The Red Lotus Quarto — Lexi, Atticus, Amelia and Hazel — need to enter the Canals of Fondue Car to get to Goh, except the entire car is going to be filled with cosplayers dressed up as them (but replacing Hazel with Chloe) in celebration for their victory against the Apex. Sashay of the Fashion Runway car states that the bets way to blend in is to have a few "flaws" in their appearances and no one will bat an eyelash. Indeed, Atticus covers his crown with a paper replica, Amelia cuts her hair short and Lexi's current attire — a kyorinrin — is so recent that no one notices.
• A recurring character in It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time is an annoying Avengers fanboy who refuses to believe that Tony and Clint (and later, Sam and Dean) are the real deal. The first time he appears, Tony and Clint get so annoyed by him they destroy Comic-Con; the second (and last) time, he annoys Castiel, who proceeds to send him straight to Hell... only for Crowley to get so annoyed by him that he sends him back. The guy then gets sent to an insane asylum. Ironically, he actually complimented Cas' "costume".
• Happens to Aang again in the Avatar: The Last Airbender fanfic Lanterns.
• In The Last Spartan a good chunk of people don't believe Master Chief is the real Master Chief, and that the armored grunt who has been made the first human Spectre is just some random soldier they put in similar armor as a publicity stunt. Ethan Jeong is the only one to personally call him out on his alleged impersonation so far though.
• In Lightning Lord Harry decides to attend a school which teaches both magic and Muggle subjects while Tonks impersonates him at Hogwarts for the first month or two. When Harry bares his forehead for a rude fellow student, the other boy scornfully claims that Harry's scar is "just henna".
• In A Man of Iron Book 4, worried no one in the North will believe Arya has undergone a Plot-Relevant Age-Up to almost 20, Mystique transforms herself into how Arya was before. Arya snaps that no one will believe this as Mystique looks far too pretty, lacks muscles, her hair is too sleek, her voice isn't high-pitched and screechy and too tall. Everyone else just smirks as Mystique looks exactly like what Arya used to.
  Mystique: We need to have a talk about your sense of self-worth.
• Mare of Steel; in the story proper and one of the side stories, Rainbow Dash/Supermare confronts some thugs who say she isn't the real deal, saying that she's "Too thin" or "Too short" to be Supermare. Rainbow gives them a demonstration of her powers to show them that she is Supermare.
• In Memorable a blind date asks Harry how much he'd charge for them to spend the night together, considering he's "such a good Harry Potter lookalike".
• In Miraculous Minisode Halloween Special 2021 , Gabriel Agreste is caught as Shadowmoth by his son Adrien, and covers by saying it's a costume for an upcoming Halloween party. During the party, Nino says that his Shadowmoth costume is awesome, but his acting isn't anything like the real villain.
  Shadowmoth: I. Will. Get your. Miraculous. Ladybug and Chat Noir.
  Nino: I dunno, dude. Costume is awesome, but Shadowmoth is way more classic villain.
• Aizawa and Mic’s Con Adventures is a My Hero Academia comic where Present Mic drags Aizawa to a hero convention. Mic has trouble convincing a group of young fans that he’s really Present Mic. Partly it’s because he’s out of costume but the kids think he’s too old and doesn’t look like Mic. Also he can’t exactly use his quirk and prove it indoors.They also have fake Mic hero licenses with their costumes so even showing his license doesn’t work.
• In the final chapter of The Model Caretaker, Celestia is on the receiving end of a particularly ill thought out prank by Luna, after which she mentions that she once entered a contest for best Celestia look-alike, placing fifth out of an unspecified number of participants.
• In the Spider-Man fanfic "Moonlight Becomes You", Otto Octavius finds himself at Harry Osborn's Halloween party and is asked by a guest what his costume's supposed to be. He replies with a smirk, "I'm Doctor Octopus," and gets criticized for his lack of tentacles (which are hidden under his coat).
• In A Most Uncomfortable Night Harry and Draco are both dressed as Dark Fae at the Hogwarts Samhain costume ball. Draco insults Harry's costume, not knowing that Harry came into his inheritance over the summer and the wings are absolutely real.
• In Not In Kansas, Kara decides to audition for main role in the new Supergirl series. Different people tell her she doesn't look, act, or dress like Supergirl despite her being Supergirl.
• In the Power Rangers fanfic "Of Love and Bunnies", Rocky, the ex-Red Ranger, shows up to Power Rangers Day in a bad Red Ranger costume... and his real Red Ranger helmet (from the former display in the back of the Power Chamber). Jason, who still has his powers and the real costume, is first shocked and then impressed by the brilliance of it.
• Hi Neighbor is a series of Marvel Cinematic Universe fics detailing Sharon's interactions with Steve when she was undercover as his neighbor "Kate". In Paws, Steve attends a Halloween party in his Captain America suit and a wolf mask (the theme of the party was bears and Steve was unable to get a bear mask at the last minute). The grandchildren of the person in charge of the party think he's too short to be Captain America which Sharon is amused by.
• In the Mega Crossover Peace and Isolation, the Citadel Council thinks that Shepard is using modified Virtual Intelligence and CGI to portray the ponies and the Space Marines when he contacts them and asks for help against the coming invasion... that is, until Pinkie Pie decides to do a little reality warping and give the Council cupcakes.
• Pony POV Series: In the Finale Arc, Daring Do eventually shows up to assist against the crisis. Even after demonstrating her strength and fighting skills, almost everyone she runs into annoys her by calling her some nutty Daring Do cosplayer. In their defense, Daring Do had been established as a fictional character. Pandora, the Goddess of Imagination, recently brought her to life to help against the crisis.
• Rising of the Sleeping Soldier: When Alucard first meets the other cardinal heroes, they all think that he is a cosplayer (given his flamboyant dressing and Bishōnen design) and that his "Savior of Humanity" schpeel was all a dramatic reading. Motoyasu even calls it a "Chuunibyou phase." It takes him levitating before their very eyes before they are convinced.
• After an akuma fight in Someone to Watch Over Me, Ladybug and Chat Noir stop for coffee, and Chat tells the barista that they're cosplayers in order to avoid attention. Which works, but the barista then gives them some tips on making their costumes more realistic.
• The Story of Twilight Glow: When Twilight first meets Nightmare Moon, she mistakes her for an actress, and barely escapes retribution for poking and prodding her.
• In the Doctor Who drabble "This 2 Shall Pass" Zoe's "costume" is acclaimed as superbly accurate, but the Doctor and Jamie aren't so lucky.
• In Sword Art Online Abridged, when Kirito eventually joins Alfheim Online, nobody recognizes him as the famous "Black Swordsman" and "Hero of Aincrad" who made such a name for himself during the Sword Art Online disaster. It turns out the entire Spriggan faction is/was comprised of Kirito fanboys who copied his look and went so far to use nearly every permutation of his preferred Online Alias (forcing him to enter the game as "xvx_K1r1t0_xvx_KillMe"), so anyone who meets the real Kirito assumes he's another of his imitators.
• In the Triptych Continuum one-shot For Nightmare Night We Are Going As Ourselves, the Mane Six are stranded until morning after a mission in a faraway town, with little money and no food. Upon discovering a high-class Nightmare Night masquerade party, Rarity has them crash the party by pretending to be themselves (with Twilight pretending to be a pegasus pretending to be her). Plenty of this trope ensues, along with disturbing revelations about what several non-Ponyville ponies think they know about the Mane Six, mostly courtesy of tabloids.
• Under the Northern Lights: Spike the Dragon has to get into a place and the management would certainly let him in if they only knew he was Spike the Dragon. Unfortunately, there have been several people dressed like him trying to get in already, and everybody says he must be a reindeer kid in a bad dragon costume.
• In a couple of Buffy fics by Litmouse,Viva Los Xanders, and A Schism in Stars Hollow, Xander accidentally discovers that there is a Xander L. Harris Doppelganger society, and comes in fifth in their look-alike contest. (Faith does better in the associated Faith look-alike contest, coming in third.)
• Weiss Reacts: Mami and Homura are both mistaken for Yang and Blake cosplaying as them by Ruby. Weiss realises that they aren't Yang and Blake, but doesn't realise they are indeed the real deal. Also, Rise is initially mistaken for an impersonator.
• In the Frozen (2013) story Where The Heart Is, Queen Elsa and Princess Anna visit the farm family of Ascended Extra Ingrid Andersen and discover that almost everyone assumes they're impostors, there to back up Ingrid's crazy stories about being friends with the queen.
• In the Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series skit "Marik's Evil Council 3", the evil meeting takes place in Michigan during Youmacon, and Marik says they can pretend to be cosplayers, and says Bakura's costume could use some work.
  Bakura: What?
  Marik: I mean, I don't want to critized, but it looks like your mother made that for you!
  Bakura: This isn't a costume, Marik. It's my clothes.
• In What in the TellTale Poker Night at the Inventory is This?, Roark stumbles into an underground party of villains on Halloween, and is mistaken for Maxie wearing an extremely accurate Roark costume. After the party is over, Archie reveals that he knew Roark wasn’t Maxie as soon as he stepped in the door, but played along because he didn’t want the other villains to find out and kill him.

Films — Animation

• In Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper, Princess Anneliese encounters Madam Carp, the Bad Boss of her Identical Stranger Erika, after being turned away from the palace by a guard. Carp, believing that she's Erika, drags her back to the dress shop she runs. When Anneliese tries to assert her true identity, Carp sneers at her and mockingly asks if she thinks just changing her hair will make her look like the princess.
• In Shrek the Third, Shrek has to infiltrate Worcestershire high school to find Fiona's cousin Arthur Pendragon, and gets mistaken for a mascot at an assembly (he claims he was working on it all night). This gets spun into a Chekhov's Gun later on as Prince Charming invades Far Far Away and stages a play on the death of Shrek - and Shrek infiltrates it by passing as one of the leads.
• In Megamind, the eponymous villain is about to blow up the Metro-Man museum in the middle of the night when he runs into snarky curator Bernard, who initially mistakes him for a guy in a cheap costume (didn't help Megamind was still in his pajamas), and gets dehydrated and impersonated for his troubles.
• Miles' first costume in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was Official Cosplay Gear bought in a Spider-Man merchandise store causing him to accidentally blend in with similarly dressed mourners at Peter Parker's funeral.
• In Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, When the gang captures a lone pirate zombie, they initially believe it to be an obvious fake, an unusual case of savvy. Unfortunately, in this instance they were Wrong Genre Savvy.
• George Harrison commented that the voices of The Beatles in Yellow Submarine (John Clive, Geoffrey Hughes. Paul Angelis) were better than the band could have been if they'd done it themselves.

Films — Live-Action

• In The American President, Sydney Ellen Wade receives a call from President Shepherd, whom she thinks is a co-worker impersonating the President. She then tells the President that he has a nice ass and hangs up. When he calls again and proves his identity, she is suitably mortified; "Y'know what, forget it, I'm moving to Canada!"
• In Back to School, the protagonist, a multimillionaire, hires Kurt Vonnegut to ghostwrite a paper on the works of Kurt Vonnegut for him. The professor who assigned the paper gives him an F, saying both that she knows it was plagiarized and that whoever wrote it "doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut."
• Batman Returns has Batman ripping off his mask in the Penguin's lair. Max Shreck asks, "And Bruce, why are you dressed up as Batman?" To which Catwoman (who'd already discovered his secret identity) responds "Because he is Batman, you moron!"
• Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure: When Abraham Lincoln has his portrait taken at a portrait studio at the mall, the photographer tells him "Okay, I need the stupid hat and the Lincoln beard back.", before Lincoln responds "You don't understand. I'm Abraham Lincoln.". The photographer doesn't buy it, trying to take both items off before Lincoln runs off.
• Braveheart; "William Wallace is seven feet tall!" This may also be a nod to the real William Wallace, who was (inaccurately) estimated to be at least 6'8. This happened because someone looked at the sword traditionally said to have been his (though it almost certainly wasn't - it's from the wrong period) which is 66" long, compared it with the average knight's sword which is anything from 30" to 45", and concluded that you'd have to be at least 6' 8" to wield it. This is nonsense; the 'Wallace Sword' is a typical two-hand late medieval sword, widely used in 15th-century armies, which didn't include whole regiments of giants.
• This is the reason that Elvis is in the old age home in Bubba Ho-Tep. After switching places with an Elvis impersonator, the impersonator died and no one would believe that he was the real Elvis. Or he's just crazy.
• Combined with Celebrity Paradox in Cannonball Run, in which Roger Moore plays a rich playboy who impersonates Roger Moore to impress women. His deception works on one woman after another, until the final segment of the film ... at which point his latest conquest mistakes him for George Hamilton.
• Casper's Haunted Christmas: Casper's uncles get mistaken for actors auditioning for the roles of ghosts... and are told they desperately need to work on their act.
• Ed Wood: A weird version, as a rehab nurse is startled by Bela Lugosi, saying he looks like that Dracula guy.
• In Dave, the main character is a part-time presidential impersonator who ends up taking the real president's place. In one scene, he and the real First Lady are out in public, and he passes them off as a husband-and-wife impersonation act. Someone comments that his impersonation was fine, but "she needs a lot of work". Primarily because she looked lost and confused, while he was experienced as a performer.
• In The Emperor's New Clothes Napoleon is being snuck out of exile, while a soldier is being brought in as a lookalike. Napoleon complains that the man doesn't look anything like him. Both men are played by Ian Holm.
• Stan Lee's cameo in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer consists of this, trying to get into Reed and Sue's wedding. This of course was a Shout-Out to the wedding in the comics where Stan Lee and Jack Kirby both try to get into the wedding.
• In The Fifth Element, Korben Dallas' mother mistakes the President for a friend of Korben's hired to imitate him when the President answers her phone call.
• In Fighting with My Family, Dwayne Johnson decides to do Paige a favor and call her father to let him know she hung out with him. Her father doesn't believe it's him, and says he has to have the worst Dwayne Johnson impression ever.
• The Funhouse Massacre: When the scare actor playing the Stitch-Faced Killer sees Eileen (the REAL Stitch-Faced Killer), she assumes Eileen is replacing her and criticizes her outfit.
• Inverted for comedy in Galaxy Quest. The Thermians generally do a terrible job of impersonating humans, with unnaturally pale skin, silver jumpsuits, and extreme Cloud Cuckoolander tendencies. But since they're hanging around a sci-fi convention, they blend in perfectly. Further played with in the finale at the convention, when the ACTUAL Sarris appears from the wreckage of the ACTUAL crashed spaceship, and is promptly shot by an actor (in-character as Jason Taggart) using a Thermian ray gun constructed in imitation of a prop (which didn't work, of course...) to the wild applause of the audience, most costumed as various Star Trek parodies, who think the whole thing is a stage performance...
• The ending of the French movie Grosse Fatigue, whose main plot revolved around impersonation.
• In A Hard Day's Night, a woman bumps into John Lennon and changes her mind several times about how much he does or doesn't look like "him" (never mentioning his name). Shortly afterwards, it happens to George Harrison, as he's brought before a fashion designer who says that "The phonies are easier to handle."
• In Hercules in the Maze of the Minotaur, Hercules and Iolaus stop in a bar and introduce themselves. The incredibly jaded townspeople are not impressed, saying they get bothered by Hercules impostors five times a week. While Iolaus is offended, Hercules shrugs and tries to finish his drink. Some men say they've had enough of the impostors and attack them. In the ensuing Bar Brawl, Hercules and Iolaus prove to the stunned townspeople that they are the real deal with Hercules' Super-Strength and their incredible fighting skills.
• In How High, street pimp Baby Powder and his assistant crash Harvard's costume party looking for his women (the two main characters had hired them to spice things up), but Powder doesn't get quite the reaction he wanted:
  Powder: *bursts into the room* Where my bitches at?!
  Tuan: You got the voice down, but those outfits no good!
  Powder: What's wrong with my shit?
  Tuan: Homie, puh-lease! Your Halloween costume! If you pimp, you broke pimp! Ha-ha-ha-ha!
• In L.A. Confidential, Ed Exley and Jack Vincennes are investigating an escort service that provides prostitutes who look like celebrities. They meet Johnny Stompanato in a bar, accompanied by a woman. Exley, attempting to out-badass Vincennes, tells the woman that "A hooker who's cut to look like Lana Turner is still a hooker." Vincennes replies, "She is Lana Turner". Truth in Television, as the real-life Johnny Stompanato dated Lana Turner. Though a few years later than the film is set; the Rule of Funny means it still works.
• Inverted in Miracle on 34th Street: When Kris Kringle shows up for his first day of work as Macy's Santa Claus, manager Mr. Shellhammer makes a point of complimenting him on his "striking costume".
• In My Fellow Americans Douglas and Kramer pretend to be celebrity look-alikes of themselves. While some people are impressed by their resemblance the "real" ex-presidents, one man says that one of them has too big a nose to be convincing.
• When Don Juan returns from supposedly being dead in The Private Life of Don Juan, he looks up Antonita, the last pretty lady he kissed before his "death". Antonita insists that the real Don Juan was taller and had blue eyes.
• In Rock Star, Chris doesn't believe it at first when Kirk calls him up to offer him an audition for the role of Steel Dragon's new singer, and tells Kirk (who he thinks is one of his own bandmates) "your British accent is even worse than your guitar playing". Undettered, Kirk calls back and says "there's not much I can do about the accent, but what do you suggest I do about the guitar playing?"
• Space Jam: After losing his basketball talent, Charles Barkley walks downtown when he passes by some teens playing basketball, who recognize him and ask him to shoot some hoops with them. However, when he struggles to play, they think he's a lookalike and say "Go away, wannabe", which traumatizes him, since we see him speaking with a therapist some time afterwards.
• In Spider-Man 2 during an Uncomfortable Elevator Moment a man comments "Cool Spidey outfit", though Spider-Man himself notes that it's "itchy" and "rides up in the crotch a little bit". Justified, because why would the real Spider-Man need to use an elevator when he can crawl up buildings? ^note  He's doing it because his powers have been temporarily disrupted, but the man doesn't know that. In the Extended Cut, an alternate version of this scene is used where the man thinks Peter's the real deal and tries to suggest merchandising deals.
• There is a 1946 Soviet movie called Springtime where an actress is taken for a role of the scientist Nikitina in a movie. She asks the real Nikitina to take her place while she's away on some urgent business (in secret). What does the producer say? "We'll make a real Nikitina out of you". And so it continues. Well, Nikitina does give some suggestions of her own about how to make the movie.
• In Superhero Movie, there's a sequence where The Dragonfly ends up at a convention where people are all wearing costumes. He meets a random fan, who explains how the convention works, then says "by the way, your costume SUCKS!"
• The original 1942 version of To Be or Not to Be has an interesting inversion — the actor Bronski, cast as Hitler in a play just before the invasion of Poland, is told by the play's director that he cannot play a convincing Hitler. To prove it, he points to a portrait of Hitler on the set. He points out all the Hilter-like features of the painting contrasting them with Bronski's demeanor and looks, before Bronski points out that the portrait ''is'' actually himself dressed as Hitler. At that point, the director responds "well, then the portrait's wrong too."
• Vantage Point has President Ashton being placed in a bunker and replaced by a body double—both are played by the same actor. Hilarious in that the body double looks totally fake thanks to his mannerisms and overzealous acting, which the real President comments on.
• Venom goes to a fancy dress party in Venom: Let There Be Carnage and gets a lot of compliments about his costume that he decides to go along with.
• Watch Your Stern: When Miss Potter is being captured on suspicion of being a spy, the Security Sergeant laughs that "he" has a nerve trying to fool him by being dressed as a woman.
• Played with in Wild Wild West: in an attempt to save President Ulysses S. Grant, from being kidnapped, Artemis Gordon disguises himself as the President, insisting that the real president is a body double "and a poor one at that". The ruse completely fails, though, as the kidnapper simply takes both of them to be sure.
• A bitchy reporter who runs into Three Finger at the beginning of Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines assumes he's just an obnoxious teenager wearing a crappy costume for the upcoming Mountain Man Festival.

Literature

• In Corpies, Titan at one point gets told that his costume isn't very convincing, and that the real titan was taller.
• In Mostly Harmless, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect meet Elvis Presley in a greasy-spoon diner on another planet. Prefect recognizes him and gives The King a hefty tip^note Prefect says it's enough to buy, roughly, Switzerland to perform "Love Me Tender" on karaoke. Arthur doesn't recognize him, and thinks The King's performance is mediocre.
• In Isaac Asimov's The Immortal Bard, one person invents a way of bringing famous people from the past to the present, and tries it out with William Shakespeare, who enrolls in the inventor's friend's college course in Shakespeare, and flunks.
• King Azoun IV on his teleporting tour.
• Older Than Radio: In The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe, the guests at the Masquerade Ball are shocked by the tastelessness one fellow displays by dressing as the incarnation of plague. Then someone rips his mask off and finds there's nothing underneath ...
• In Terry Pratchett's Moving Pictures, the wizards decide to disguise themselves as wizards when they don't want to be seen attending a movie - they twist bits of wire into their beards to make them look like badly-made false beards, for instance. However, the trope is then played straight when they later need to be taken seriously and no-one believes they're real wizards.
  • Also in Discworld, the Sweet Polly Oliver platoon-members in Monstrous Regiment were denied permission to pass themselves off as women to infiltrate an enemy base by their clueless officer, who didn't think they could pull off this deception as well as himself. When they tried it anyway and got captured, the enemy officers likewise thought their costumes were laughably bad ... until one of the Pollys lifted her skirts.
  • When Death is summoned in one book, he was at a costume party, and says he was enjoying himself, but things might go downhill at midnight because "that's when they think I'll be taking my mask off."
• In Something Rotten, Hamlet gets into an argument with a group of Shakespeare fans who challenge him to a contest of who can perform the best "To be or not to be" speech. Hamlet loses.
• Maurice Baring (a friend of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc) loved this trope; his anthology Orpheus in Mayfair features it at least twice. One isn't quite this trope but it's definitely in the ballpark, the eponymous story: a Greek musician is hired to play "authentic Greek music" at a party, his first big break in a while, but then his son gets sick. He's desperate, and then Orpheus appears, and offers to cover for him. Of course, Orpheus' music — which could turn nymphs into trees with its beauty, mind — is too authentically Greek for them, and they don't like it. In another, a woman sells her soul to the devil to have Shakespeare attend one of her parties. He shows up, but, Shakespeare having been almost boringly normal, he just makes small talk with the guests, and nobody even realizes who he is.
• Often happens to the heroine of the French Fantomette series, to the point that she doesn't worry much if her friends are involved in one of her adventures since they just never suspect she's the real thing. On the other hand, one of her friends is sometimes mistaken for her.
• At one point in My Side of the Mountain, after he's been living in the woods for a while, Sam makes a foray into town, wearing one of his deerskin suits. He meets another boy, who assumes he's into the Davy Crockett/cowboys-and-Indians trend (the book was written in the late fifties) and tells him his outfit looks totally fake, sarcastically asking if he chewed the leather himself (Sam responds that he actually ended up softening most of it by hitting it against a rock, only chewing a little around the neck).
• In Brecht's short story "The Monster," a destitute old man has a striking resemblance to the lead actor in a film about a notorious anti-Semite (because he is said notorious anti-Semite), so they let him play himself in a scene or two. They find his acting wooden and not dramatically sadistic enough. He's just happy the script calls for him to eat an apple.
• In the first Star Wars Legacy of the Force novel, Luke and Mara sneak into the capital city of Corellia disguised, not as themselves, but as actors (with a Han and Leia to complete the troupe). They pass, but the guard says that no one would believe in a Luke Skywalker that short, despite Luke's whining insistence that he can "do backflips just like him." Once they're out of earshot, Luke asks Mara what her real hair color was before. Mara is not amused.
• Tarzan experiences this at the end of Tarzan and the Lion Man, after being cast as the stupid white hunter and killing a trained Hollywood lion. Told that he's "not the type", he goes back to Africa.
• In The Outlaw Demon Wails, Rachel inadvertently lines up for a costume contest and is told she was close, but "Rachel Morgan's hair isn't that frizzy." Despite that, she would probably have won had Trent not also been in line, looking like himself.
• In Bel Air Bambi and the Mall Rats, one of Richard Peck's more obscure YA novels, there is a part near the end where the school delinquent/bully shows up to a casting call, to audition for the role of...you guessed it...the lead female delinquent/bully for an in universe movie based on the books plot; basically, she was auditioning to play herself. She is passed over for being way too-over-the-top for the role!
• One of the Star Wreck novels by Leah Rewolinski involved the characters arriving at a Star Wreck convention. Commander Dacron was told his costume needed work.
• In the third book of The Looking-Glass Wars trilogy, "Arch Enemy", Redd (the Queen of Hearts) tries to return to her old mountain stronghold... only to discover it's been turned into a tourist attraction whose proceeds go toward promoting the principles of White Imagination (as opposed to the darker Black Imagination Redd favors). And while she did use a piece of cloth to disguise herself, the man in the ticket booth fails to realize who she is even after she balks at having to pay "to get into [her] own home", and amusingly thinks she's pretending to be herself ("You do play the part, don't you?").
• In First Drop of Crimson in the Night Huntress series, Mencheres is forced to turn Kira into a vampire, and the villain deliberately leaks video of this, which ends up on the news and YouTube. YouTube commenters, being a special brand of stupid and horrible, post such gems as "Worst actress ever," "Should have had more blood," and "WTF is up with the lame glowing eyes?"
• In the Horatio Hornblower short story "The Last Encounter", Hornblower, now retired to his estate, receives an evening visitor who claims to be Napoléon Bonaparte, asking for a carriage so he could go to France and run in the presidential election. "Napoleon" is taller than him, does not dress at all to resemble him and instead follows dandy fashions of the day, and doesn't have the correct accent, so Hornblower concludes that it's a case of Napoleon Delusion. Hornblower lends him a carriage (mostly because it amused him) but some weeks later he and his wife gets a letter from the new President of France, Napoleon Bonaparte the Third (nephew of the Trope Namer), graciously thanking them for the service they rendered, making this more a case of Exact Words (and perhaps Napoleon exploiting the Napoleon Delusion trope).
• Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. runs into this when he's at a cosplay con. The person critiquing his "costume" is one of the judges of the costume contest.
• Invoked in the first InCryptid book by the Fish and Strips, the club where Verity waits tables. Nearly everyone who works there is a cryptid, but the bar's shtick is cute monster girls and they all wear obviously fake costume pieces, which makes their very real nonhuman attributes seem just as fake.
• In a flashback in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Voldemort gets complimented by a Muggle child on how realistic his Halloween costume looks. The kid then has an Oh, Crap! moment when he realizes it isn't a costume.
• In Worm, Eidolon is the most famous and powerful Parahuman in the world. In the rare moments he takes off his mask, people are often disappointed by his real, unattractive appearance. He is likened to someone dressing up as Eidolon for an office Halloween party.

Live-Action TV

• Invoked in Welsh singer Charlotte Church's short-lived TV show; it included one sequence in which she went undercover as a Charlotte Church lookalike. Her disguise? Deliberately singing horribly. The judges were shocked at her uncanny resemblance to the, er, real Charlotte.
• There is a one-off British comedy charity special starring Sir Bob Geldof as himself. In short, he finds himself stranded at a pub where a celebrity impersonator karaoke competition is ongoing. Through a series of developments Geldof winds up singing the Boomtown Rats' breakout single "I Don't Like Mondays" live. The crowd is underwhelmed and first prize goes to the Elton John impersonator, much to Geldof's outrage. Basically it's this expanded out to a thirty-minute show.
• On 30 Rock, Jenna entered a Jenna Maroney impersonation contest. She came in fourth.
• In one episode of The Big Bang Theory, Leonard and Raj see a man they believe is Nathan Fillion at a restaurant, but when they ask, he denies it. As they're leaving, Leonard apologizes for bothering him, which prompts him to admit that he is Nathan Fillion, he just wanted to enjoy a meal in peace, but since they've been respectful, he offers them a picture and an autograph. Raj, who was convinced until this point, suddenly decides that he can't be Nathan Fillion after all.
• In the Blackadder episode "Major Star", a last minute change requires that Sweet Polly Oliver 'Bob' dress as a woman for a variety show. Melchett is utterly disgusted by her performance and thinks that she makes a horribly unconvincing woman. Then again, he was still upset after the alleged death of her predecessor Georgina.
• In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Buffy vs. Dracula", the Monster of the Week introduces himself:
  Buffy: Who are you?
  Dracula: I apologize. I assumed you knew. I am Dracula.
  Buffy: [skeptically] Get out!
  Then later:
  Buffy: And you're sure this isn't just some fanboy thing? 'Cause I've fought more than a couple pimply, overweight vamps that called themselves Lestat.
  • "Actually, Billy Idol stole his look from... never mind."
  • Angel pulls this on himself in "Lie To Me" when complaining about vampire fanboys, saying that they can never get the right look to appear genuine. Right on cue, a fanboy dressed identical to Angel walks by.
  • The Scoobies catch sight of the Initiative commandos on Halloween during "Fear, Itself", but think they're more people playing dress-up.
  • Although he's not being himself specifically, one episode of Angel has Lorne being told that he got the forehead wrong on his costume.
    Librarian: Although I suppose those horns are hard to do...
    Lorne: (Laughing) You have no idea.
• In the season 3 summer finale of Burn Notice, Fiona's brother tells Michael (an American undercover as an Irishman) that his American accent is "dodgy".
• Inverted in Charlie's Angels: Sammy Davis Jr. plays a liquor-store owner who wins a Sammy Davis Jr. look-alike contest. He accepts the award — from Davis himself, via split-screen — but insists that he doesn't 'really' look like Davis.
• Twice on Chicago Fire Matthew Casey uses a goofy Australian accent as a joke, once when imitating a neighbor and once during a game. A meta example as Jesse Spencer is Australian.
• On Community, Jeff Winger got mistaken for a British actor by a fan and played along, telling her that he was practicing an American accent for an audition. Later, the fan angrily tells him that his American accent stinks.
• In a Halloween episode of Dark Angel, several of the cast (who were transgenic supersoldiers with barcodes on their necks) tried to pass for people dressed as... transgenic supersoldiers with barcodes on their necks. The response to the costumes varied, some were considered cool, others unoriginal, and some normal humans were using the same costume. The transgenics were actually what they were cosplaying as, and using it as a cover, but some were still told it needed work. Also played with where one transgenic, a lizard man bred to fight in the desert, doesn't quite get it, goes around with a football helmet on as his costume, saying he's Joe Namath.
• Doctor Who: In "The Woman Who Fell to Earth", a drunk man encounters the Monster of the Week, an alien warrior in full armour Hunting the Most Dangerous Game, and mockingly tells him that Halloween is next month, while throwing pieces of food at him. He doesn't live long enough to tell any more jokes.
  • Also, in the episode "The Next Doctor", the Cybermen don't recognise The Doctor as they believed a fake was the real one. It lead to this exchange.
    Rosita: Who are you?
    Hartigan: You can be quiet. I doubt he paid you to talk. More importantly, who are you, sir, with such intimate knowledge of my companions.
    Doctor: I'm the Doctor.
    Cyberman: Incorrect. You do not correspond to our image of the Doctor.
• In an episode of Drake & Josh, Josh keeps getting attacked because he looks an awful lot like a criminal called the 'Theater Thug'. Later, Josh later comes face to face with the real deal and the police show up. Guess who they tackle.
• One episode of The Drew Carey Show has Mr. Wick, who claims he can tell a crossdresser on sight, told to find the crossdresser in a crowded department of Winfred-Lauder. He walks up to one and claims, loudly, "Every crossdresser does Dionne Warwick!", adding that this one is a particularly poor example. He is then reduced to stammering when his victim proves she's the real Dionne Warwick.
• This is the reaction Barry gets in The Flash (1990) when he decides to pull a For Halloween, I Am Going as Myself. Then again, at this point in the series, all anyone knew about the Flash is he's a red and gold blur when using his speed.
• A meta-example occurs in an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where the real Isaac Hayes plays a Hayes-impersonating Minister. Will, of course, says his Hayes impersonation is terrible.
• Gilligan's Island: Ginger hears on the radio that Hollywood is making a movie about her life, The Ginger Grant Story, and she wishes she were home so she could play herself in it. Mrs. Howell tells her, "You know if you tried that, they'd say you weren't right for the part."
• In an episode of Grimm, a Löwen (a lion-faced Wesen) ringmaster is running a traveling circus whose greatest show is him revealing realistic-looking monsters (all of whom are, of course, Wesen in "full woge"). Naturally, while people are impressed, they assume it's all very realistic-looking masks. The star of the show is a Blutbad named Max. He goes for a walk, and two women who saw the show invite him to their place to see "the monster". They discuss how it's a very realistic mask... then he goes "full woge" on them.
• Alex (a woman dressed as Marilyn Monroe) loses a Halloween drag queen contest to Max in an episode of Happy Endings.
• Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha: When fangirl Ju-ri first meets her idol June at her father's cafe, she comments that it's probably an impersonator and berates herself for nearly falling for a copycat.
• House, M.D.: In a meta example, the American Dr. House (played by the very British Hugh Laurie) calls a clinic posing as an English doctor and is told his accent is obviously fake. Justified in that Laurie was deliberately exaggerating his accent for the scene.
• On I Dream of Jeannie, Jeannie throws a party for some old friends, all of whom are great figures of history. Bellows shows up at the house unexpectedly and, assuming it's a costume party, tells Henry VIII that he has overdone it with the fat padding.
• The premise of a one-time special called I Get That a Lot is a celebrity doing a mundane task (such as Mario Lopez working at a hog dog stand) and laughing off people who recognize them, usually by saying the eponymous phrase.
• I Love Lucy:
  • In the episode "Don Juan Gets Shelved", Lucy wants to hire an actor to play a producer trying to steal Ricky to convince an MGM producer not to fire him. Unbeknownst to her, the very producer she wants to fool overhears her plight and volunteers himself as an actor. Lucy is reluctant to hire him because he doesn't look the part at all, corrects his wardrobe, and coaches him on how to sound important and act like a producer and never feels she makes any progress.
  • In another episode, Lucy spots Charles Boyer in a Paris cafe, but Ricky convinces him to tell her that he's just a look-a-like. She later persuades this "false" Boyer to play the real one in an attempt to impress Ricky and the Mertzes, instructing him on how to be a more convincing Boyer as he doesn't quite have the same passion.
• The reality behind this trope is discussed in an episode of Impractical Jokers. During a challenge, Murr ends up meeting an avowed fan of the show who fails to recognize him and says he looks just like Murr. Bemused, the other Jokers say that they're often asked how nobody recognizes them during filming and that this trope is at least part of it. The number of times that they've been recognized can be counted on one hand.
• Lucifer: In the third episode, Lucifer discovers that some loser has been impersonating him when a woman believes he is the impersonator. She calls his accent fake.
• The Lucy Show:
  • Lucy recruits what she thinks is an Ethel Merman look-alike to sing in a Boy Scout fund-raiser, in an effort to live up to her inflated promise about getting the famed star to participate. Needless to say, the real Ms. Merman decides to go along with the charade, considering it's for a worthy cause, and allows Lucy to "teach her to sing like Ethel Merman."
  • In one episode, Lucy convinces some neighbors to install a shower for her. Instead, they hire a professional plumber, introducing him as a handy friend. Lucy spends most of her conversation with the plumber commenting on professional plumbers, and how he looks nothing like a professional plumber, even when he says it point blank.
• M*A*S*H, during a Movie Night when the projector is being repaired, the staff entertain themselves with singalongs and a joking "Imitate Father Mulcahy" contest. When Mulcahy decides to speak himself, the others jokingly shout him down as if he were a poor imitation of himself.
• In a Halloween Episode of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Rita's Monster of the Week is based on Frankenstein's Monster; when he crashes the Juice Bar's party, everyone there assumes he's just another party-goer.
• In an episode of Mork & Mindy, Mork decided to reveal his existence as an alien to a tabloid reporter who was offering a reward for anyone who could prove the existence of extra-terrestrial life. Mindy and her father, hoping to save Mork from becoming the subject of a media freakshow, both claimed to be aliens to draw the reporter away from Mork. In the end, the reporter angrily scoffed at the obviously fake aliens, saying that Mork was the least-convincing of the three.
• On Muppets Tonight Beaker does an uncanny Little Richard impression◊, actually a cameo of Little Richard himself, on which the show's host, Clifford, comments "Worst Little Richard impersonation ever!"
• The Nanny did a similar one with Marvin Hamlisch guest starring as Fran's old music teacher who looks remarkably like Marvin Hamlisch.
  • In another episode, Fran is in Atlantic City and runs into Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme by a poster advertising their engagement that night. Fran thinks they're impersonators, even when they start singing, and begins telling them how their performance should be. Humorously, after Fran leaves them, Steve talks to Eydie about how Fran is correct about one of her points ("She's right, you do need to look at me adoringly." "I ALWAYS look at you adoringly!").
  • Hell, they used this trope... with Fran Drescher, playing herself. Specifically, in the penultimate episode, Fran and Niles meet the real Fran checking into a Hollywood hotel; they admit to being fans of...The Nanny and tell Drescher that their favorite characters are naturally themselves. Fake! Fran is also shocked that Real! Fran's voice actually sounds like that nasal. It gets even weirder when, in an aversion of Celebrity Paradox, Fran Drescher tells Fran Fine to tune in for the big series finale of The Nanny next week.
  • Real Life example: Some fans believe the actor portraying Maxwell Sheffield doesn't sound British, and suggested he learn from the actor portraying Niles. Sheffield is the one portrayed by an actual Brit.
  • In one first-season episode, Maxwell, distracted by problems at home, turns away dozens of women auditioning for a new Broadway show. He complains that he's looking for a big-name Broadway veteran with a ton of experience and an instantly recognizable voice... and that's when Carol Channing shows up. She gets one note of "Hello, Dolly," her Signature Song, out before Max shouts "NEXT!"
• In a Halloween episode of NCIS, the team crashes a costume party in search of a suspect in a kidnapping. They're promptly told that they look very authentic, except they spelled 'CSI' wrong on their hats.
• The New Avengers: In "Faces", Gambit poses as a homeless man to infiltrate a group creating duplicates of intelligence operatives. While looking for someone he can turn into a double of Gambit, the plastic surgeon initially doesn't think the disguised Gambit will be suitable.
• In the Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation episode "Turtles' Night Out", the Unknowables assume the Turtles to be people in turtle costumes and one of them remarks that they look like they were ripped off by the store they bought their costumes from.
• An episode of Madeline Kahn's sitcom Oh Madeline combined this with Celebrity Lie, where she told a friend that she could get Johnny Mathis to come to their class reunion. In trying to cover up her lie, she went through a few Johnny Mathis impersonators... then the real Mathis comes to the door and she gives him tips on being more authentic.
• In Laura Kightlinger's episode of Pulp Comics, a Comedy Central show that interspersed stand-up with illustrative short film pieces, Laura expressed that she'd like to be so famous, that drag queens would dress up as her when she was dead. In the subsequent scene, two obvious Laura impersonators dress her down for her bad costuming, bad wig — and poor tucking job.
• On Reign, Mary and Catherine end up getting lost and finding themselves in a small village. They soon see a pair of con artists posing as Mary and Francis, taking advantage of how most in the country have never actually seen their rulers. Meeting the imposter Mary in private, Catherine says she knows she's a fraud... as she and Mary are "mother and daughter" who pull the same con posing as Mary and Catherine. The imposter Mary laughs on how it's not bad although she knows she makes a much better Mary and that "the real Catherine looks so much older."
• An episode of Renegade has Reno meet a man who claims to be Elvis. He looks and even sings similar, and Reno begins to have some doubts. After a while, he finds the man at an Elvis look-alike contest, complaining about this trope (he lost). Subverted in that it turns out that he isn't Elvis but Elvis's manager, who blames himself for the King's death.
• In a Vegas-based episode of Roseanne, the Conners have to settle for seeing a Wayne Newton impersonator rather than the real deal, but Newton himself shows up partway through the show and takes over. Roseanne is out of the room for his entrance, and comes back (drunk) to heckle what she thinks is a bad impersonator. ("He doesn't even have a mustache!")
• Happens in RuPaul's Drag Race in the Season 9 premiere, which featured Lady Gaga as the guest judge. As the queens were making their grand entrance, Gaga decided to mess with them by entering the Werk Room along with them, making them think she was just a queen whose schtick was impersonating Gaga. As one queen remarked, "I see who the Derrick Berry^note A Britney Spears impersonator who was a contestant in Season 8 of the season is." For added laughs, Gaga even appeared in the Confession Cam in boy-drag as "Ronnie." Needless to say, when she revealed herself as the real thing, the queens completely lost their shit.
• Saturday Night Live:
  • One episode had Stevie Wonder posing as a Stevie Wonder impersonator and Eddie Murphy's character telling him how to look more like Stevie Wonder.
  • Another episode had a Buckwheat impersonator, portrayed by Murphy (who had spoofed the character to massive critical acclaim until he had the character assassinated because people were requesting it too much), being told his impersonation was subpar.
• In Seinfeld, Jerry makes a show based loosely on his life. Kramer can't get the part to play himself. (It is implied this happened to the guy he's based on.)
• In the Shoestring episode "The Teddy Bears' Nightmare," Eddie introduces himself to a skeptical shop assistant, who tells him, "You're wasting your time. You don't even sound like him." After Eddie proves his identity by playing a trailer for his show, he says, "It doesn't sound much like me, does it?"
• An episode of Stargate SG-1 involves a Show Within a Show called Wormhole X-Treme! that was a low-budget knock-off of the actual show. During the episode, the crew complains that the script calls for a spaceship to appear during the episode but that the budget doesn't allow for that. At the end, the crew is filming outside, when an actual massive starship descends through the clouds and hovers right above them. The camera guy is told to film it. At the end, two crew members discuss how fake the ship looked and mentioning that they'll fix it in post.
• The Suite Life of Zack & Cody:
  • London wasn't allowed back into her own party because she didn't have an invitation and tons of other girls had dressed up like her to get in the party.
  • When the school performs High School Musical Maddie (Ashley Tisdale, who played Sharpay in the film) auditions for the role of Sharpay... and fails. Later on, to cover up the poor singing voice of London, who was cast as Sharpay, Maddie fakes her voice Singin' in the Rain style.
• In the Supernatural episode "Hollywood Babylon", the Meddling Executive character assumes that the Deliberately Monochrome ghost he runs into on-set is an extra in body paint, and calls makeup because he thinks the noose marks on her neck would look better on camera if they were red.
• An episode of Taking The Falls implied that Elvis was still alive, and hiding out at Elvis Impersonator conventions.
• The entire premise of the game show To Tell the Truth was for a semi-famous or notable person to be paired with two impostors, and the contestants had to figure out which was the real one. They often got it wrong. It usually used people who might be known by name or reputation, but not by appearance, to the panelists doing the guessing (the founder of a company or organization, an inventor, or a very minor author, for example). The two impostors were also similar in age and appearance to the real person. The show was famously pranked by professional prankster Joey Skaggs, who sent an impostor in his place. Skaggs pulls the impostor-as-him trick so often that the impostor knows pretty much everything about him, and what he makes up at least sounds plausible...
• A famous example occurs in the Will & Grace episode "Gypsies, Tramps, and Weed." Jack gifts himself a Cher doll and treats it like the real thing, as Cher is his idol. Will, Grace, and Karen get fed up with his obsession and storm away, prompting Jack to soothe the doll. A voice then remarks that it's weird that Jack is talking to a toy. Said voice belongs to the real Cher, who just so happened to be nearby. Jack, of course, naturally assumes that she is "just some drag queen" (although he gives "him" credit for pulling off the look), and launches into his own Cher impression to give her tips. Cher tries singing "If I Could Turn Back Time" to prove her identity, but Jack takes this as another invitation to show off. It isn't until Cher slaps him across the face and says "Snap out of it" that he realizes that it's actually Cher... and he promptly faints dead away.

Music

• Referred to in "Talk Normal" by Laurie Anderson:
  I turned the corner in Soho today and someone
  Looked right at me and said "Oh no!
  Another Laurie Anderson clone!"

Print Media

• Inverted in MAD Magazine's "A Mad Look at Batman", where the hero chases a crook into a masquerade party, and then walks out with first prize.
• In the Dragon Magazine article "The Ecology of the Troglodyte", the Framing Story is a wizard describing to his fellows how he used a spell to occupy a troglodyte's body in order to learn more about them. Throughout his story, a heckler in the audience criticizes the illusions he uses to illustrate his findings. At the end, the wizard admits he was unable to reverse the spell, and has been using magic to animate his unconscious body from the "illusionary" troglodyte.

Theatre

• Played with in Forbidden Broadway Volume 3, where Carol Channing interrupts an actress impersonating her, asking for help on playing herself. This was loosely based on a Real Life incident between Channing and celebrity impersonator Rich Little.
• In a German cabaret sketch from between the wars, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe returns from the afterlife to come to the aid of a student by taking an oral exam on Goethe in his stead. In this exam he answers questions with things he actually said, such as: "What is Goethe's most important work?" - "The Theory of Colours, of course." Or he replies as Goethe probably would have: "What can you tell me about Goethe's relationship to Frau von Stein?" - "That's nobody's business!" So of course he fails the exam.

Video Games

• Jade Empire has an example of this Trope. At one point, the player character can appear in an ersatz Beijing Opera production of a famous battle... as a female character. If the player is female, the director will comment on how unrealistic they look as a woman.
• In MOTHER: Cognitive Dissonance, on Saturn before Bowfest '8X, you play as Zarbol and another insectoid in a UFO named Boson, who is bringing the group their instruments to play for the crowd. As Colonel Saturn approaches them and says they are nearly ready to play, a fanboy Shambler approaches them and tells the Colonel that his own hat is off and fights them for the chance to play at their own show. After he gets trounced, he says they'd make an acceptable cover band.
• In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, the president of Luigi's fan club wants to meet the man in green personally. If you wear the L Emblem, changing Mario's shirt and cap to green, she'll be convinced that Mario is Luigi and offer him a present... just in time for the real Luigi to show up and get chased off as an impostor. Which is particularly jarring since green Mario still has the "M" on his hat. It's also a Call-Back to the days where Luigi was nothing more than a color-swapped Mario. It was only later that he got his own design, becoming taller and thinner than Mario.
• In Ultima VII, the Avatar can audition to understudy the lead role in a play... called "Tales of the Avatar". The director will then instruct you to buy an Avatar costume (which looks exactly like what the Avatar's already wearing), and no matter what you do in the audition, the director will politely decline to cast you.
• In Mass Effect 3, during the Citadel DLC, if you bring Javik along to the Silver Coast Casino infiltration, when Shepard needs a distraction so s/he can disable a camera blocking his/her progress, Javik goes up to a guard and says that he's a Prothean. The guard responds that Javik is the fourth one he's seen this week alone, but his costume's better than the rest. Something similar happens if he's around when you meet Kirrahe at a salarian intelligence base; he thinks Javik is a surgically altered drell meant to screw with the Reapers.
• In Shadowrun Returns: Hong Kong, bringing Gaichû with you to the deckers' convention will lead to at least two comments on his 'cosplay', one noting that his (authentic) Red Samurai armour is the wrong shade of red and the other geeking out over Gaichû's 'commitment' by making his Red Samurai 'replica' out of actual metal instead of just going with cardboard or styrofoam.
• At the "Ransome jerk-alike contest" in Thimbleweed Park, nobody believes that Ransome is the actual Ransome the *BEEP*ing insult Clown. Ransome comes in third place (out of 3), no matter what you try.
• Zig-zagged in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, where at one point B.J. steals the identity of an actor named Jules Redfield to infiltrate a casting call to play the role of "Terror Billy"... that is, himself. He flubs an initial line-reading, causing Hitler to comment that he could learn much from another actor who nails the reading. Then comes time for a mock battle with a fully-armored guard, and the first actor panics over a light nosebleed after taking a small smack to the face, and he's laughed off (and also shot)... and then B.J. steps in and straight-up murders the guard, emptying his own gun into him, smashing his corpse repeatedly with it, then throwing it at the glass and threatening to do the same to every other Nazi in the world without a care that by all rights this should have blown his cover. They eat it up, with Hitler specifically praising him for being so attuned to the psychotic urges of "Terror Billy", and he gets the part.
• In Chapter 3 of Fire Emblem: Awakening, Raimi calls Chrom out for impersonating Ylissean royalty, despite the fact that Chrom is a Prince of Ylisse, wields the Falchion, and bears the Brand of the Exalt. The yonkoma lampshades this, with Robin staring at Chrom's Brand and planning to show it to Raimi, but Chrom insists on fighting.
• In Spider-Man (PS4), background chatter from pedestrians includes someone mistaking Spidey for a street performer. He actually sounds impressed - "This guy almost looks like Spider-Man."
• In the intro to the Call of Duty: Zombies map "Call of the Dead", George Romero is shooting a zombie action film when a real zombie shows up, missing its jaw and looking very gory. Romero's response is "Get back to Hair and Makeup, you don't look nearly dead enough!"
• In Puyo Puyo! 15th Anniversary, during Satan/Dark Prince's story mode, Klug says that Dark Prince's wearing a costume, more or less saying he isn't really who he is. Let's ignore the fact that Klug said Satan was a myth, but let's focus more on the fact he's saying that our green-haired villain is wearing a costume of a guy from an entirely different section of Puyo Puyo's history. Which he got from a book about another dimension. ...Unless he means the real Satan...

Web Animation

• Inverted in Homestar Runner: Homsar enters a Strong Sad impersonation contest, and his costume is so good he gets mistaken for the real Strong Sad and disqualified.
• A Red vs. Blue ad for RTX has Sarge complaining he lost the "Best Sarge" at the cosplay contest to Simmons.

Webcomics

• In a strip where Casey and Andy goes to a comic-con, some kid claims that his Wolverine-claws are much more realistic than Mary's — and while she might not actually BE Wolverine, her claws are actually razor-sharp, retractable claws implanted through mad science!
• In Dork Tower, Sonya, a furry, believes that Carson, a genuine anthropomorphic muskrat, is "a guy in the worst dog suit ever. Or marmot suit, or sheep suit, or something."
• Girl Genius:
  • Subverted when Aaronev Sturmvoraus catches his son up on the play they were watching; he mentions a "hilariously bad midget in a cat suit." Sounds like he was talking about Krosp, right?. Well... no. Turns out there really was a midget in a cat suit.
  • Also deliberately invoked by Mama Gkika. Jägermonsters aren't allowed in Mechanicsburg, and she runs a club where the girls all make themselves up to look like Jägers. With all these fake Jäger girls, nobody notices the real ones in their midst.
  • Later, the crowd in the street is at first not convinced that Gilgamesh Wulfenbach is exactly who he says he is. At least, until he puts on the hat.
  • Agatha and the circus arrange a horde of Jägers, consisting mostly of actors, but lead by Da Boyz. One of the actors tells Dimo his make-up needs work.
• In Schlock Mercenary Schlock tries to get a part in the circus demonstrating his various abilities, but fails because his abilities aren't as impressive as the ones possessed by Sergeant Schlock in the TV show very loosely based on his adventures.
  Schlock: The TV-me is putting me-me out of a job.
• In Venus Envy, Chris, a cross-dresser, critiques Zoe (a transgender woman)'s breasts and dress, upsetting her... and then starts critiquing Lisa, who, unlike Zoe, is cisgender. It doesn't end well for Chris.
• Hookie Dookie Panic strip named "Full Metal Jacket vs. Fullmetal Alchemist":
  We all learned what happens when one confuses a Marine in his uniform for a cosplayer...
• In Exterminatus Now, Lothar uploads a video of Demon Morth getting killed by a Greater Demon online as "Extreme Badger Baiting". Several comments list it as "fake" with one even claiming you can see a zipper. And another asking how they did the CGI.
  • Meanwhile, one commenter on the comic wondered if since Morth's entire plan relied on getting followers by livestreaming his ascension, this reaction meant that it was doomed from the start. Author!Eastwood recognized that it was "a flaw in Morth's plan".
• Julie of Our Little Adventure is told this by one of the Elven agents posing as her.
• The picture for this page comes from The Adventures of Gyno-Star.
• In Buster Wilde Weerwolf, a drag queen meets Buster and thinks he is just a lunatic in a costume and tries to pull off Buster's mask but Buster really is a werewolf.
• Grrl Power: Bonus art by Dave Barrack shows Sidney Scoville (the real superheroine Halo) losing a "Halo Lookalike Contest" to a much bustier contestant. Sydney isn't happy.
• Karkat Goes To A Convention: There are multiple instances in the story where the real Homestuck characters have their costumes critiqued by the various cosplayers. This actually becomes important, as it's eventually revealed Homestuck got some of the details wrong about the characters.

Websites

• In this Drawception game (a website hosting games of "telephone Pictionary"), a player dismissively described one of the drawings as "a bad imitation" of a certain user's characteristic drawing style. Of course, said drawing was in fact made by the very user in question.

Web Videos

• Played straight in the Half in the Bag review of The Dark Knight Rises, in which Mike uses his signature Plinkett voice to impersonate Fake Plinkett in a phone call. This is the first half of the exchange:
  Mike: (normal voice) Hello?
  Radio Guy on Phone: Hello there! Is this Mr. Harry S. Plinkett?
  Jay: (softly) Oh, pretend to be Plinkett.
  Mike: (Plinkett voice) Yeah, this's Harry-ass Plinkett, who is this?
  Jay: That is the worst Plinkett impression I've ever heard! He's gonna think you're a fake!
  Mike: (whispering) Shut up!
• Ross of Game Grumps and Steam Train claims to have once been asked to do an Australian accent for a cartoon, only for people to pan his "unrealistic and shit accent". Though to their credit, Ross also acknowledges that while he was born and raised in Australia until he was 24, he has an "international" accent now from living in the United States.

Western Animation

• In American Dragon: Jake Long: Jake finds himself out in the street in his dragon form. Luckily it was Halloween so no-one freaked out, but a passerby did call his "dragon costume" unconvincing. Likewise when Hans Rotwood offered a reward for photos of a real dragon Jake gave him some photos of himself that Rotwood decried as fakes, but this time because they were too good, as most other Cryptozoology photos (e.g. Bigfoot◊ or Nessie◊) are blurry and taken from distance.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • In "The Serpent's Pass", Aang tries to get his group free passage on the ferry to Ba Sing Se. The woman taking tickets doesn't find his Avatar costume any more believable than those in the nearby group of impersonators. For some reason, he never considers just airbending to prove who he is instead.
  • Naturally, in "The Ember Island Players", a kid tells Zuko his "Zuko costume" is great, but his scar's on the wrong side of his face. In the kid's defense, the Zuko character in the play they're watching had it backwards, so technically - if he was cosplaying as Zuko, the character, not Zuko, the exiled prince - he did have it wrong.
    Zuko: The scar's not on the wrong side!
• The Batman: Inverted in "Grundy's Night" when a Halloween partygoer assumes Batman is a guy in costume, but thinks the costume is great. Batman plays along with this and asks if he's seen a "friend" of his in a Solomon Grundy costume (seeing as he's looking for the real one).
• The Beatles: The episode "Misery" has the boys at a museum to see their wax statue lookalikes. As a prank, John and Paul replace their wax figures with themselves in the same pose. A young lady and an elderly lady approach the exhibit:
  Young lady: It's amazing, ain't it? You'd swear that Ringo and George were alive.
  Elderly lady: But whatever happened to Paul and John? They look like death warmed over! [John and Paul take on non-plussed looks on their faces]
  Young lady: Probably used a cheaper wax.
• A classic Bugs Bunny short called "Napoleon Bunny-Part" featured Bugs butting heads with a cartoon Napoleon Bonaparte. Bugs eventually escaped by getting Napoleon dragged off by insane asylum orderlies who thought he was someone suffering from the Napoleon Delusion.
  Napoleon: But I am Napoleon!
  Orderly: Suuuuuuuuure you are.....
• In reference to the Charlie Chaplin example, below, it was once noted in Danger Mouse that Penfold, Danger Mouse's sidekick, once came third in a Penfold lookalike competition.
• Darkwing Duck:
  • The title character was told he was much too short and his costume could never be confused for the "real Darkwing Duck" when attending a costume party with his neighbors. It's always been established that they aren't too bright.
  • In the Real-World Episode "Twitching Channels", Darkwing and Megavolt invert this trope by complaining that their images in the popular cartoon series Darkwing Duck get their noses wrong (Darkwing complains that his beak, as drawn, is big enough to land fighter planes on).
• Inversion: In the Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines episode "The Cuckoo Patrol," the Squadron is dressed as birds in order to more delicately infiltrate where Yankee Doodle Pigeon is, only as usual they crash out their planes. They wind up at a cottage where a daffy clock maker needs a cuckoo bird for his giant cuckoo clock. Dick Dastardly can't get his costume off, and the clock maker takes him as the perfect cuckoo for his clock.
• An episode of DuckTales (1987) had Gizmo Duck go to a convention where everyone was dressed as him. No one's believes he's the real guy and he tries to prove he is by showing the mechanics of his suit, which other people have as well.
• The Family-Ness: In one episode, Ferocious-ness enters a parade pretending to be a float modelled after the Loch Ness Monster, but is annoyed when he only wins third place. It turns out that the judges were looking for a more stereotypical plesiosaur-type design of Loch Ness monster rather than Ferocious-ness’ Godzilla-like appearance.
• The Fairly OddParents!: The episode "Take and Fake" has Crocker saying this to Cosmo, Wanda and Poof at Trixie's costume party, somehow failing to recognize them as the fairies he's tried to capture several times already.
• Freakazoid! once chased Cave Guy into a convention where he mistook a guy in a costume for the real Cave Guy. After ripping the costume's head, the man tried to rip Freakazoid's "mask".
• In Futurama, Lrrr — RULER OF OMNICRON PERSEI 8! — tries to invade Earth, but he lands at a comic book convention right in the middle of a costume contest and is mistaken for just another contestant.
• Hey Arnold!: After faking his own death, singer Dino Spumoni changes his mind and decides to tell the public the truth by showing up at a concert hall... only to be told to get in line with a bunch of other Dino impersonators.
• Justice League has a few examples, such as in "A Knight of Shadows" when Wonder Woman and The Flash are denied entry into a party, despite being superheroes, because everyone else are "in costume" ^note read: superheroes too!
• One episode of KaBlam! has June meeting a group of fans of hers that are so obsessed that they dress like her and have their hair like hers. So when she tries to interview them, they naturally don't believe she's the real June and proceed to get rather angry when she keeps insisting that she is.
• Kim Possible: While not bothering with the Secret Identity thing, Kim is still rejected from the senior table because she couldn't carry off the "Kim-Style" fashion, despite its being based on her mission outfit (and named after her).
• Miraculous Ladybug:
  • In "Horrificator", the class is making a monster movie for a contest, only to be interrupted by one of them turning into an actual monster (as is usual). Nino manages to get their battle with her on tape and edits it into their film... only for Mayor Bourgeois, who's a judge, to reject the project from entering. He thinks the monster looks too fake.
  • In "Frightningale", Marinette and Adrien end up playing their superhero selves in a music video. While everyone else praises the costumes (which actually were not their real magic suits, but were so similar that both removed their masks) and some acknowledge a resemblance, they decide that the pair's awkward mannerisms make them nothing like Ladybug and Cat Noir. In this case, it was self-invoked so as to protect their secret identities.
• The Loud House: In "Great Lakes Freakout!", while trick or treating as zombies, Carlota and Leni give another pair of zombies advice on how to improves their costumes, before realizing they are real zombies.
• In the Monsters vs. Aliens (2013) episode "Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space", the Missing Link is unable to scare people on Halloween because everyone just assumes he's a guy in a costume. One kid mistakes him for Kermit. The biggest insult comes from a kid dressed as Link:
  Missing Link: Hey, genius. I see you're dressed as me.
  Kid: No, I'm dressed as the Missing Link. You're dressed as a fat mermaid.
• In the Motorcity episode "Mayhem Night", after briefly mistaking a trick-or-treater for one of the Terras, the trick-or-treater tells the main character "nice Mike Chilton costume."
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Stranger Than Fan Fiction", Rainbow Dash and Quibble Pants get kidnapped by Dr. Caballeron. Quibble Pants, not understanding that this is real and thinking this is a staged performance, mocks Caballeron and says he is a horrible cosplayer, and he got the accent wrong.
• Ninjago: Dragons Rising: To get a part needed to fix a machine, Zane enters a Zane-alike contest. He comes in third. Out of three.
• The Owl House:
  • Subverted when Camila sees Vee's true form for the first time. They initially think that the basilisk is someone in a costume and starts to compliment it on being well made, but then trails off as they slowly realize that it's too good to be a costume.
  • Then again when King meets the Titan Catchers. He assumes them to be of his own species, while they assume him to be what they are; ordinary people dressing up as the Titans. Bill gushes to Luz about how good his costume is, which tips her off what he's in danger.
• Brain of Pinky and the Brain has quite some issues proving in court that he really is a mouse.
• Quick Draw McGraw: El Kabong couldn't claim a reward because he was mistaken for one of the several impostors trying to claim it.
• The Replacements: Dick Daring once got a makeover and his wife mistook him for an imposter because of this.
• The Secret Show: Victor Volt once entered a Victor Volt impersonator contest but got third place.
• The Simpsons:
  • Played with in "$pringfield (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)", in which Bart is forced to find a last-minute replacement act for his treehouse casino, because "the Liza Minelli impersonator we hired turned out to be the real Liza Minelli".
  • In "Itchy and Scratchy Land", Homer and Marge visit a 1970s-themed disco:
    Homer: It is the '70s! Down to the smallest detail!
    Marge: Look! The bartender even looks like John Travolta!
    Travolta: Yeah... "Looks like".
  • In "Simple Simpson", no one believes Homer can be Pie Man even after he reveals himself, having built him up into an urban legend. Subverted when Marge says she has always known Homer was Pie Man, Homer asks if it was the kiss that filled her in, but Marge replies she knew because it was obviously him in the costume and you'd have it be an idiot not to see that.
  • In the "Treehouse of Horror XVI" segment "I've Grown a Costume on Your Face", Springfield held a costume contest and a woman dressed as a witch won but was disqualified for being an actual witch (the prize had to go to someone who, technically, was wearing a costume). In retaliation, she cursed everyone into being whatever their costumes made them look like.
  • In the opening of "Treehouse of Horror XX", at Halloween, Frankenstein's Monster, Count Dracula, a Mummy and a Werewolf decided to pose as people dressed as themselves but were mocked for impersonating old-fashioned characters, so they bought real costumes anyway.
• South Park:
  • In one episode, Satan throws a Halloween party, and at one point starts to complain to what he thinks is a guy dressed as Steve Irwin, complete with a stingray embedded in his chest, telling him the costume is in bad taste so soon after Irwin's death. When the guy protests that he's actually the real Steve Irwin, Satan then throws him out of the party for not wearing a costume.
  • A very early episode features Mr. Garrison auditioning to play Mr. Garrison in an America's Most Wanted reenactment of a crime he witnessed. He didn't get the part.
  • In one of the Halloween episodes, Kenny wore an insanely elaborate ED-209 costume and got frustrated every time someone immediately identified him through the costume. This being an early-series episode, he ended up getting tripped and blown up by tiny Rebel snowspeeders.
• The Spectacular Spider-Man:
  • Peter Parker gets this response from Flash Thompson on Halloween when he goes from patrolling the city to showing up in front of his classmates in his costume. ("Puny Parker?! He looks nothing like Spider-Man!") Mary Jane Watson and Liz Allen on the other hand... feel that he fills out the costume quite nicely ("You can web me up anytime, Petey.").
  • When Eddie Brock is wheeled away screaming about how "WE ARE VENOM!" in "Identity Crisis", the onlooking Flash Thompson scoffs at this, saying, "Brock's lost it. Venom's, like, twice his size."
• In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "The Krusty Sponge", Mr. Krabs decides to make the Krusty Krab SpongeBob themed, including making Squidward wear an exaggerated SpongeBob costume and making SpongeBob drive a train around the restaurant. When SpongeBob collapses from exhaustion, this angers the passengers and one even shouts, "That's the worst SpongeBob costume I've ever seen!"
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987):
  • Raphael won a ticket for a costume party cruise and went as... himself. A pompous aristocrat dressed as one of the Turtles complained that Raph was trying to upstage his expensive high-quality costume with a cheap knock-off.
  • Another episode had all four Turtles attending a Channel 6 costume party as themselves and giving out pseudonyms. Some people compliment them on their lifelike costumes — except Vernon, who actually knows the Turtles and says these guys look nothing like them.
• In the pilot of Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015), Bumblebee gets called a "bad imitation of Bumblebee" by a pair of museum security guards. (It's because he's acting oddly, not because of his appearance, though.)
• In Ultimate Spider-Man (2012), Peter's high school has a theatrical play about Spider-Man. Out of the students who try for the main part, everyone is considered a better fit than Peter himself. As a Mythology Gag, the student right above him on the list is Miles Morales.
• The PBS cartoon WordGirl features Becky, a.k.a. WordGirl, being told by her brother, the WordGirl fangirl, that her WordGirl impersonation is really bad.

Real Life

• Charlie Chaplin failed to even make it to the finals in a competition to impersonate the "Little Tramp" persona that himself made famous. The part of the story that is often left out is that he was deducted points for not showing up in costume, because his participation was a spur-of-the-moment thing.
• George Harrison once won third place in a Beatles Look Alike competition.
• Duran Duran have managed to subvert this by making a little cash by entering Duran Duran lookalike contests and winning them. So they look like themselves, but not so much that people think they actually are themselves.
• Dolly Parton once lost a Dolly Parton lookalike contest. Even better, the other competitors were Drag Queens, and her comment was that she looked shorter next to them since most of them were around six foot.
• And here's Joss Whedon pretending to cosplay himself.
  Joss Whedon "cosplayer": It took a lot of paper mache... white, pasty — I did a lot in the forehead.
• In that vein, this is certainly not Kevin Smith protesting his own film.
• According to his autobiography, Lewis Black had a friend who produced a TV pilot with a character that was basically Lewis saying what Lewis would say. Lewis was considered for the part, but had to audition to play himself — and lost the part. As he said in a stand-up routine about the incident, "Unbeknownst to me, there was a better me!" (The show wasn't picked up.)
  • Comedian, actor, and professional poker player Gabe Kaplan (best known from Welcome Back, Kotter) recounted a similar story when he appeared on Just For Laughs in the early 2000s, where he saw an impersonator playing him in a 1970s nostalgia stage show, and figured he could do a better job of playing himself. The show's producer told him that he was just being Gabe Kaplan, not doing Gabe Kaplan.
• In a similar but less funny vein, Margaret Cho got her sitcom, All-American Girl, greenlighted, with herself in the starring role As Herself. Network executives then told her that she would need to lose weight. To play herself.
• Tina Fey, impersonating Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live, has been described as "more like Palin than the real Palin". To the point where a quote she said on SNL, specifically "I can see Russia from my house" has been attributed to Palin, with the actual quote being "You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska." The latter happens to actually be true, though it's really only in the case of the Diomede Islands in the Bering Strait.^* Little Diomede is US territory and Big Diomede is Russian territory with only a two mile distance between them. That said, the only permanent inhabitants of Little Diomede are a small native village of fewer than 200 (who, admittedly, CAN see Russia from their houses) and Big Diomede is completely uninhabited. Also note that a lot of map projections distort land near the poles (the same effect makes Greenland look roughly the size of Africa).
  • Quotes from the sketch were also passed off as part of the real Katie Couric interview transcript, and this was further confounded by the fact that some sketches have Fey reading quotes of Palin verbatim. They got laughs from the audience.
  • Even Fox News has managed to accidentally mix up the two, illustrating a story about Palin with a photo of Fey.
  • Made even more meta in one cold open of SNL, with Tina doing her Palin impersonation, and Alec Baldwin backstage confusing her for the real Palin... who happens to be standing right next to him, and whom he calls "Tina" a couple of times before Lorne Michaels comes out and sets the record straight.
• A similar thing happened in Sweden when comedian Christine Meltzer parodied Silvia, the Swedish queen, on comedy show "Hey Baberiba". The parody was part of a series called "Familjen" (the family) which made fun of the royal family on a weekly basis. Hey portrayal was so spot on that some now feel like it's almost as if the queen is parodying Meltzer.
• Played with when Jesse Eisenberg hosted Saturday Night Live in season 36. Eisenberg (who played Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg in the movie The Social Network) was met by Andy Samberg (playing Mark Z.) who criticized Eisenberg's impersonation of him... until the real Mark Z. — who points out that Eisenberg is his evil twin and Samberg's impersonation is weak — comes out.
• Ellen DeGeneres allegedly attended a look-a-like show or two in Vegas to fake being one of the performers. She apparently had received comments to the extent of her being "too pretty" to be the real Ellen. (Naturally, the best of these made her talk show.)
• Cher, due to her LGBT Fanbase, is one of the most drag queened women in the world. The real Cher told a story on The Graham Norton Show in 2010 about going to the wedding of two male friends of hers. Someone saw her and assumed since they were at a gay wedding in San Fransico, she was a Drag Queen. She asked Cher for her card and told her she was the best she'd ever seen and wanted to hire her for a party. She then realized it was the real Cher.
• An advert once featuring Tony Hadley, lead singer of Spandau Ballet, performing "True" at a karaoke night—and being heckled by people accusing him of butchering the song.
• A similar story is told about the Russian performer Grigory Leps, who only got 70 performing one of his hits on karaoke.
• British comedian Bill Bailey has also said that he has been accused of "trying to look like Bill Bailey" by random passers by. It's a play on this joke that led him to play a set of identical twin police officers with opposing personality but the same rank in Hot Fuzz.
• Someone once told Al Gore in a restaurant "If you dyed your hair you would look just like Al Gore."
• Dr. Phil has admitted to occasionally being stopped in the street by passers-by who say "I know you're not, but you look almost like Dr. Phil."
• Inverted by Albert Einstein, of all people: Thanks to his infamous hair, when he went out, he would often get passers-by asking if he was indeed the famous physicist, but he'd tell them they were mistaken. "Always I be mistaken for Professor Einstein!" An Urban Legend sprang up that Einstein once pranked the media by switching places with his chauffeur, then fielded a question from them as the chauffeur. The chauffeur-as-Einstein supposedly passed off the question to Einstein-as-chauffeur by saying, "Why, that question is so elementary, my chauffeur could answer it."
• Marilyn Monroe was walking down the street with an interviewer. No-one was noticing her, and the reporter was confused by this. She then said, "Want to see her?" She changed the way she walked and gestured, and suddenly people started noticing her. This makes sense since body language and posture can make a huge difference in perception.
• While on a date on a Florida boardwalk, Bettie Page spotted a souvenir postcard with her picture on it. As a joke, Page begged her date (who was unaware of her modeling career) to buy it for her. At the end of the date, she slipped the postcard into his pocket. It was only when he discovered the postcard in a drawer decades later that he realized that his long-ago date had been that Bettie Page.
• One interviewer accompanied Mel Gibson to the DMV, with only a baseball cap as a disguise. He then watched Gibson visibly "turn off the charm" and become so inconspicuous that only the ID photographer noticed a vague similarity.
• Carl Reiner wrote a pilot based on his work as a writer for Your Show of Shows and played the character inspired by himself. When the pilot was rejected, he recast himself with an unknown comic named Dick Van Dyke... and thus TV history was born.
• Not exactly a lookalike contest, but there is a story about late great Kurt Vonnegut (who is, ahem, well known for having his way with words) helping his grandson to write an essay. The lad got D. This was referenced in Back to School.
• Russian writer Valentin Kataev once also got D for a school essay, and the topic was his own story. The teacher even made a helpful explanation to the effect that the essay completely missed the point of the story. The same also happened with a relative of Thomas Keneally.
• Not a look-alike, but similar. Self-effacing author Quentin Crisp mentions in the introduction to the movie adaptation of his autobiography The Naked Civil Servant, that John Hurt plays his life "Far better than I ever could."
• Willie Nelson once managed to slip into a town and enter the "Willie Nelson Look Alike Contest". He won third. The winner even appeared on an episode of The Tonight Show that the real Nelson was a guest on.
• Grace Kelly several times had cab drivers telling her that she looks like Grace Kelly, according to a particular biography.
• Keith Flint (of The Prodigy) relates in this interview how he was dissed by passersby: "Who do you think you are, the Firestarter?" and his awkwardness in knowing how to reply. ("But I AM the Firestarter....")
• Dwayne Johnson told an anecdote on a talk show about him overhearing people who were trying to decide if he was The Rock and ultimately deciding he wasn't because he wasn't handsome enough.
• Noah Antwiler ran around the 2009 Chicago Comic Con dressed as his character Dr. Insano, and had a fan compliment him as "the best Insano cosplayer she'd ever seen." Similarly, Todd in the Shadows was once recognized in a con as "a Todd in the Shadows cosplayer".
• Adam Savage reported at Dragon* Con 2009 that a fan told him "Dude, you are doing him so well." Evidently people recognize him exponentially better when he's appearing with Jamie, rather than without. To wit, from the show:
  Adam: I might be that guy from that show, but Jamie is without a doubt that guy from that show.

Jamie does have his rather distinct mustache as beacon of his identity, not to mention his beret, glasses, and dirt-shielded white shirt.

• An inversion of the trope so weird it's actually true: Alan Conway, a travel agent from Muswell Hill, London, spent time in the '90s impersonating reclusive director Stanley Kubrick. Even though Conway looked nothing like Kubrick and knew nothing about any of his movies, he completely fooled interviewers and critics.
• Kubrick himself inverted this trope. Being somewhat of a recluse, very few people in the press knew what he looked like, so when they knocked on his door asking for an interview, he simply answered the door himself and said "Stanley Kubrick's not home". Very rarely was he second-guessed.
• In an interview on Rove Live, former Muppeteer Kevin Clash told an anecdote about how he performed Elmo's voice in a store... and other people there said they could do a better job.
• Virtuoso concert violinist Joshua Bell in 2007 busked in a DC Metro station and made a grand total of $59. Possibly justified since a metro station is generally noisy, the acoustics are lousy for a violin and it was during rush hour, so many people probably couldn't stop. The low income generated may be less about mistaking him for a lesser performer, and more about completely not noticing him. This was done as part of a study, and several people who had passed through the station were asked if they had seen anything unusual in the station. All but one didn't even remember there being any violinist. The one who did remember though, (a postal worker by trade) could not shut up about him.
  • Subverted as Bell was recognized, and the woman who noticed him discreetly gave him a full $100 bill. This was discounted from the total of his earnings because she knew who he was and what his skills were implicitly valued at.
• There was a new translation into Swedish of The Lord of the Rings. The translator says he signed up at a forum to discuss the translation, but he was quickly flamed by people who argued he had obviously no idea how the translator thought!
• Tim Curry was once kicked out of a theater during a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show because the employees there thought he was an impersonator.
• Ernie Hudson auditioned for the role of Winston in The Real Ghostbusters and lost. Then again, nobody really looked or sounded like their movie equivalent. According to Maurice LaMarche, the only two black guys at the audition for Winston were Hudson and Arsenio Hall (who got the part), which was naturally extremely awkward.
• An interesting one from Bobcat Goldthwait:
  Bobcat: This lady walked up to me and said "Don't take this the wrong way, but you look like Bobcat Goldthwait." [Beat] How am I supposed to take that?
• John Leeson, the voice of K9 on Doctor Who, once placed second in a K9 sound-alike contest he entered under an assumed name.
• In the introduction to Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, he tells a story of being picked up at an airport by a driver holding a cardboard "Carl Sagan" sign. The driver said, "You have the same name as that science guy." And it turns out the driver had the reverse problem. His name was William Buckley.
• Dan Castellaneta, voice of Homer Simpson, once told of how he was told by a Simpsons fan that they would love to meet the voice of Homer. When he told her that he did the voice of Homer, the woman laughed him off.
• British comedy personality Harry Hill stated in an interview that he was asked by a man on the street who he was because the man recognized him from somewhere. The man started naming celebrities who he thinks he could be leading Hill to say: "How about Harry Hill?" The man said no, stating that he looked nothing like him.
• Alluding to a rising Broadway star whose name was on everyone's lips, a Hollywood director at a party (so the story goes) pointed to someone dancing and said "Forget Gene Tierney! Get me that girl!" It goes without saying who "that girl" was.
• A story about the nineteenth-century chess champion Emmanuel Lasker holds that he once visited a chess club and played some games unrecognized by anyone there, including a man who called himself "the Lasker of this club". Sometimes it's told about Max Euwe playing with a guy during a train ride.
• Peyton Manning has stated that the best way to avoid being recognized is to wear a Peyton Manning jersey.
  • This is a joke. For a while Peyton Manning's jersey was one of the most sold jerseys of all time. For some reason, they were worn even by people who clearly had no idea who Manning was or any interest in the team. Not jerseys in general, just Manning's. This has stopped being quite so true in recent years though.
• Inverted by Jewel, who went so far as to wear a fake nose and a wig to sing her own songs at a karaoke bar. Nobody recognized her at all (until The Reveal), and she got rave reviews on how well she did Jewel songs. She even sang the same song later the same night out of costume, under the auspices of making a "surprise appearance" as herself - before the full reveal, an audience member who hadn't caught on said she thought this other woman had done a better job than the "real" Jewel.
• Adele once donned a fake nose and chin to prank an Adele impersonator contest. Unlike Jewel, however, once she started singing and kicked off her shoes (something Adele often does on stage,) everyone instantly realized who she was: her voice and performance style is simply that distinctive.
• Japanese filmmaker and comedian Beat Takeshi told a story on an episode of Takeshi Art Beat about being accosted by a drunk in a bar out in the boonies for "trying to be Beat Takeshi".
• Olympic skater Dorothy Hamill was at a White House party and someone told her she had "almost a Dorothy Hamill haircut."
• When Disney decided that it would be a good idea to create a family sitcom based on the very R-rated indie comedy Clerks, the film's two leads, Brian O'Halloran and Jeff Anderson, decided to audition for their respective parts from the film. However, Anderson's character of Randall had already been cast with Saturday Night Live star Jim Breuer, so instead the two auditioned for O'Halloran's Dante. Neither got the part, and a no-name actor who looked nothing like O'Halloran was instead cast as Dante for the failed pilot. O'Halloran and Anderson have both gone on record saying they don't regret losing the part.
• Actress Joan Allen once told a story on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno of a woman approaching her in a gym locker room who remarked that she resembled a young Joan Allen. Which she took as a compliment.
• Minecraft developer Jens Bergensten has tweeted an image showing him joining a server and being called "not the best fake I've ever seen".
• Some critics and audiences criticized the "actor" who played Senator Joseph McCarthy in Good Night, and Good Luck. for being too over-the-top. All of the McCarthy moments were actually archive footage of the real Senator McCarthy.
• For Lawrence of Arabia, David Lean hired Anthony Quinn to play the Arab leader Auda abu Tayi. Quinn did his own makeup and showed up on set in costume. As they were filming on location in Africa, Lean assumed Quinn was a local Arab and told his assistant to get on the phone and fire Quinn, as he wanted to hire the "Arab."
• During San Diego Comic Con in 2013, Hugh Jackman wandered around San Diego in the full Wolverine garb.
  Not one person stopped me. One person said "not bad". Another said "too tall". ^note In the comics, Wolverine IS canonically only slightly taller than Kitty Pryde...
• Also at Comic Con 2013, Bryan Cranston went around dressed as Walter White... complete with plastic Walter White mask. While certainly amusing, it does make it hard to tell how to categorize this example.
• Nathan Fillion has been told that his imitation of Malcolm Reynolds "needed work".
• David Michael Bennett, who play The Spine in Steam Powered Giraffe, posted about the trip he took to Comic Con in full costume. Even when he dropped hints (or flat-out stated) that he was the actor behind the character, several fans still thought he was merely a very convincing cosplayer.
• While in a bookshop, journalist and political commentator Andrew Marr was approached by someone who told him "You look just like that Andrew Marr bloke. You poor bastard."
• There is also an amusing story of Queen Elizabeth II walking into a shop dressed fairly ordinarily. The shopkeeper remarked something along the lines of "Excuse me, but you do look awfully like the Queen." The Queen replied: "How very reassuring."
• Kit Harington was once approached in a bar by a woman who said that he looks like Jon Snow. However, when he explained that he plays him, the woman wouldn't believe him, saying Jon is taller.
• Jess Harnell was once told that his Wakko Warner impression "Didn't sound anything like him!"
• The owner of a haunted house near Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, refused to purchase a mannequin that he felt was not lifelike enough. It was actually the corpse of Elmer McCurdy.
• Inversion: voice actor Mark Meer does not look like Commander Shepard from Mass Effect. Yet when he attended Dragon Con cosplaying as Shepard, some fans managed to recognize him!
• Larry Kenny, the voice of Lion-O from ThunderCats, once met two boys at a Toys 'R' Us who were arguing about which ThunderCats action figure to get. He introduced himself, and in his Lion-O voice, told them to get a Lion-O action figure. As he walked away, the boys said he didn't sound anything like Lion-O.
• When Law & Order: UK premiered, some viewers criticized Jamie Bamber's British accent, having assumed Bamber was an American after watching him for the past four years on Battlestar Galactica (2003). Bamber is in fact British (though he has US citizenship thanks to his father being American) and needless to say, the British accent is the real one.
• Rakugo storyteller Katsura Sunshine was born in Toronto Canada, and grew up speaking English before he apprenticed in Japan and became fluent in Japanese. Sometimes he's asked to perform in English for Japanese audiences, such as one time in Hokkaido when he performed "Jugemu" at a university. After the show he got to read surveys filled out by the students, who left comments like "Sunshine-san speaks very good English; I was surprised," and "Sunshine-san's English sounds almost like a native speaker's." (emphasis added) It's even funnier because Sunshine has blond hair and looks like an obvious westerner.
• During World War II, the actor Peter Butterworth was captured by the Nazis and put in Stalag Luft III, where he became part of the Wooden Horse escape; one of the vaulters over the vaulting horse concealing the tunnel. When he auditioned for the 1950 film The Wooden Horse, he was told he didn't look heroic or athletic enough for the part.
• Kylie Minogue once went to a drag queen event themed around her and said the queens just outshined her when she got pulled onstage by the queens. Admittedly, she wasn't dressed for the event since she was just coming from seeing another band and was attending the drag event to wind down.
• Inverted by Steve Martin on a The Tonight Show appearance, where he had the winner of a Steve Martin lookalike contest come out as him for about a minute before hopping out (he was tied up) shouting about the impersonator.
• An auditory instead of a visual example, but voice actor Tomokazu Sugita once did an impression of Gintama for some relatives' children. The kids complained that he didn't sound like Gintoki at all. Sugita tweeted about it to fellow voice actress Sumire Uesaka, who more or less referenced this trope.
• As part of his act, the Russian comedian Maxim Galkin occasionally includes a (possibly apocryphal) story about his friends and fellow celebrities Filipp Kirkorov and Alla Pugacheva. According to him, the three of them were in an elevator, when a couple of obviously provincial visitors entered. The ride down was totally silent with the couple staring at the three celebrities. Just before exiting, the guy smiled and pointed at Galkin, telling him that he looks like the original the most, leaving Kirkorov and Pugacheva in shock.
• On her website, Patti LuPone mentions a time when she auditioned for a part where the prototype was her, Patti LuPone, and in the audition room ended up being told she was wrong for the prototype.
• While in a McDonald's in mid-2006, Eminem overheard two kids debating whether or not to go over to him for an autograph. The kids eventually concluded it couldn't be Eminem because "Eminem ain't fat". This prompted him to yell "motherfucker" at them.
• Gay male celebrities, such as RuPaul's Drag Race winner Bob The Drag Queen, sometimes run into trouble while using apps like Grindr for perfectly normal gay male activities. Not only do people not believe it's really them, but sometimes their profiles get flagged for using a "fake" picture... of themselves.
• On a similar note, in January 2020, Sharon Stone took to Twitter to complain that she had been kicked off Bumble. There had been multiple flags on her account because nobody would believe Sharon Stone was on a dating app.
• Rowan Atkinson revealed in The Graham Norton Show that a guy in a car parts place looked at him and told him that he looked like Mr. Bean. When Rowan told him he's actually the actor who played Mr. Bean, the guy laughed and didn't believe it because "the resemblance is uncanny".
• A variation: Margaret Atwood commented on an indictment of a shooting victim for manslaughter of her unborn child with "The Handmaid's Tale comes to life in Alabama. Women must heed the warning". A fellow Twitter user replied with "I think you and I were watching different shows".
  • Similarly, Twitter user @monark24 wanted to know if @Lin_Manuel is aware that the "play" Hamilton is a fictional depiction of the Founding Fathers. Lin-Manuel Miranda is the author of said musical. ^note (Straight) plays and musicals are not actually interchangeable definitions. Straight plays' plots are driven by dialogue. Musicals' stories are driven by music, lyrics, and occasionally dialogue (in the case of non-sungthrough musicals. Hamilton is sung- and rapped- through.)
• Real-life inversion: Voice actor Frank Welker, noted for his exceptional animal-vocalization work as well as his ubiquitous speaking roles in cartoons, was once nearly credited for the work he'd done on an animated piece he'd never recorded anything for. At the last minute, the folks compiling its closing credits recalled that, no, they'd used an actual horse this time.
• After the airing of the Doctor Who episode "Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror", fans complained that the accent of Tesla's actor was way too slight for a Serbian immigrant. The actor in question, Goran Višnjić, is from the region where the real Tesla was born (now part of Croatia) and emigrated to the United States at roughly the same age Tesla did.
• In this video, Nancy Cartwright meets a thirteen-year-old boy. Upon hearing her slip into her Bart Simpson voice (easily her most recognizable role), he praises her impression as "really good." Cartwright giggles at the mistake and asks the boy if he knows who the voice actor is... and a few seconds (and another use of the voice) later, the kid's eyes go wide as he realizes he's actually talking to Bart. Becomes a Heartwarming Moment when Cartwright hugs the boy, who is genuinely star-struck by her.
• In 1996, David Bowie commemorated the digital release of his single "Telling Lies"— the very first work by a major artist to be officially available via digital download— with an online chat session where he and two impersonators played an inversion of Two Truths and a Lie: Bowie would tell various factoids about himself, while the impersonators told equally-convincing lies. As the session was text-only, there wasn't any way of telling who was who. The chat was then tasked with voting for which presenter they thought was the real Bowie; when the results came in, Bowie ended up in dead-last, being outvoted in favor of both of the impersonators.
• Kenta Miyake has a son who is very much a fan of All Might, but is too young to realize that Miyake plays All Might. When he tested this out by saying "I Am Here" in-character, his son said it didn't sound right.
• Zach Galifianakis once told a story of being approached by someone who said, "You look just like that guy from The Hangover ... no offense."
• Tony Hawk's Twitter is full of either Recognition Failure (i.e a flight attendant notices four skateboards and asks if Tony Hawk is in the flight) or this trope.
• Inverted: Bob West, the original voice actor for Barney the Dinosaur, would occasionally have parents tell him that their children heard Barney in his voice, without knowing that he was the voice of Barney.
• A variation: Eddie Van Halen once told the story of the time he was standing in line at a Tower Records, and Michael Jackson's "Beat It" (which Van Halen performed the famous guitar parts for) was playing. Some kids were snarking over the song, and when it came time for the solo, one of the kids stated "Listen to this guy trying to sound like Eddie Van Halen." Van Halen then tapped the child on the shoulder and rebutted with "That is me!"
  • Ironically, when Van Halen was contacted by Quincy Jones asking him to provide the solo, Van Halen refused to believe it was really him and hung up on him.
• Another variant: John C. Reilly has talked about how he would run into parents who would tell their very young child that he was Wreck-It Ralph, only for the kid to say that he didn't look like Ralph. (According to him, kids only really understand that sort of thing if they're older than eight.)
• Bill & Ted:
  • Franchise creators Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson stopped in a McDonald's on the way to the first day of filming Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and noticed two teenagers who they thought would be a perfect Bill and Ted. They realised when they got to the studio that the boys were Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves.
  • Winter and Reeves once walked out of a restaurant and got caught up in the New York Halloween parade and someone said "Hey look, it's two old, fat guys trying to be Bill and Ted".
• A casting director once told Georgia Tennant, David Tennant's wife, that she "wasn't convincing" as the wife of his character. (To be fair, they're thirteen years apart in age.)
• June Foray described an amusing instance of this in her autobiography. When the team behind The Smurfs (1981) needed someone to play Mother Nature, Joe Barbera went through nearly two dozen audition tapes that he dismissed for sounding too much like June Foray... until he finally came across one that didn't. Guess who she was...
• Paul McCartney occasionally comes to visit his childhood home when he is in Liverpool, though usually keeps his visit pretty low-key, for obvious reasons. One of the custodians of the house tells a story about one particular sleepy Sunday afternoon when Paul, sitting quietly in his car and watching the goings on in the street, was approached by a local who asked him if he wanted directions to the house. Paul replied "No need - I am Paul!" In response, the local studied him carefully, and said "Nah, you're not. You look a bit like him though!"
• Lenny Kravitz was once detained by police in Miami on suspicion of robbing a bank. He didn't have his ID with him, and the Miami police did not believe him when he told them who he was. After the bank manager cleared him, the Miami police came to his home personally to apologize. He wrote the song "Bank Robber Man" about the incident, which appeared on his 2001 album Lenny.
• The band KISS launched the tour supporting their album Psycho Circus by playing a Halloween show at Dodger's Stadium. On their way back to their hotel, they got caught up in the Hollywood Halloween Parade. Since they were only a few blocks away, they opted to just get out of the van and walk. Numerous people complimented the accuracy of their costumes, but nobody put it together that it was the real KISS coming back from playing a show for 40,000 people.
• GACKT once signed up for a dating service, paid a fee for putting up his picture… and found out the next day he had been banned from the service for impersonation.
• According to a member of the rock band Rudely Interrupted, the band once met Tom Cruise. However, the band's blind drummer refused to believe it, thinking the other band members were playing a prank on him.
• Philip Glass worked as a cab driver while he was already known as a composer, and passengers occasionally noticed that he "looked like" himself. If one asked him if anyone else had ever pointed it out, he just said "yes".

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