Twinless’ James Sweeney: ‘The sex scene leak sucked – they pulled it from release in France because of it’

“I mean, I’m human. It’s like, I want to be liked. I enjoy validation,” says James Sweeney, the writer, director, producer and – exhales – star of Twinless, an exceptionally sharp-witted, genre-mangling film, twisting between psychosexual thriller, black comedy and moving familial drama.

Thankfully, the past 12 months has brought the 35-year-old validation in spadeloads. After Twinless premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January 2025, it bagged the coveted Audience Award. A bunch of other festival accolades followed. One year on from its debut, and it’s finally reaching the UK side of the pond, critical adoration in tow.

The past year has been a tale of two halves. Critics and audiences have swooned over Twinless for its sardonic humour and sharp directorial viewpoint, landing it with a 97 per cent approval rating on film rating site Rotten Tomatoes. Sweeney, overjoyed in the audience with his family at Sundance’s Eccles Theatre for the premiere, watched “every beat land and get laughs and gasps. You could hear the tears. Everything I was hoping would work was working,” he says. “It was a peak moment for me.”

Despite the praise, there have been tougher moments. For starters, the road to Twinless has been exceptionally long; a first draft was written in 2015, and casting took place in 2020, yet 100 financiers turned it down for various reasons, including the apparent unlikeability of Sweeney’s character Dennis. He’s a gay man who falls somewhere between “lonely”, “extremely complicated” and “reprehensible demon twink”, depending on which Redditor you ask. “Yeah,” Sweeney grins. “We had a test screening card that was like, ‘Dennis is evil.’”

At a grief counselling group for bereaved twins, Dennis meets Roman, whose gay twin Rocky has died in an accident. Dylan O’Brien gives a career-best performance in the dual role of both twins, oscillating between Rocky’s magnetic bravado and Roman, who is embittered by grief. Roman and Dennis bond over their ostensibly similar loss, but to say anything more would spoil the almighty twist, which arrives early on in the film but packs no less of a punch. 

It’s best to go into Twinless cold; a thrilling prospect for cinephiles, a slightly unnerving one for industry top dogs. After Sundance, Sweeney had a “real tough time” trying to get the film acquired and marketed. He felt that “winning the Audience Award would be a most major sign of commerciality”, but was instead told: “Well, we don’t know how to sell this.”

“That was hard and illuminating but also, in retrospect, it’s like, yeah,” he shrugs. “We were trying to curtail so much in terms of the spoilers and trying to preserve the experience of going in blindly as possible. But you also have to sink people’s teeth into it and convince them to pay their hard-earned money in an increasingly challenging theatrical marketplace.”

Word did get out about the contents of Twinless, though it wasn’t the twist that caught fire on social media. Instead, a fleeting sex scene between Sweeney and O’Brien leaked online, whipping up a feral frenzy. It helped boost the film’s profile, sure, but it also led to a deluge of people pirating the film. “The leak really sucked to be honest. I was told recently that we’re supposed to have a French theatrical [release] but they pulled it because the film was pirated too much in France.” Sweeney speaks thoughtfully about his past year, but is clearly careworn. “That just like, f***** sucked.”

Sweeney knows he can’t control the box office, nor the leaks, or the audience response. “What I can try to control is the people that I surround myself with,” he says. O’Brien was relentless in his support for Twinless, sticking by Sweeney through every rejection. “I’m just trying to enjoy the process because it’s so painful and it’s going to hurt no matter how much control you have, so if I can carry that with other people that I like spending my time with, for me, that’s everything.”

If I were O’Brien, I would’ve stuck by the movie too. A three-minute monologue he delivers as Roman, where guilt about the gulf between him and his gay twin mixes with the raw grief of not being able to rectify the fact, is one of the most potent performances of the past year. “I don’t know how to f****** be here without you,” he says through wretched sobs. 

It’s a dynamic scarcely explored on screen, that of a straight man and their fractious relationship with a queer sibling, particularly after one of them has died. “I think sexuality, like many other aspects of identity, can be something that brings us together or something that tears people apart,” Sweeney says. Despite Roman’s complex relationship with Rocky’s sexuality, and regardless of Rocky distancing himself because of it, their experience on earth was singular in many ways. “Something that Dylan and I talked about in terms of how he was crafting his performances [was] wanting to make sure that you still feel like they were at once tied to the hip, you know? Even though they grew into very disparate lives, they’re still in many ways speaking from the same soul.”

Sweeney’s childhood was peripatetic; born near Sacramento, he moved several times due to his father’s job in the Air Force. He grew up fascinated by the Olsen twins and The Parent Trap, hence making a film about twins, and spent time performing in regional theatre. While studying screenwriting at Chapman University in California, he realised that he was keen to direct, too.

His first film, 2019’s Straight Up, also explores the yearning for connection through a queer lens, though he prefers not to box his films in by theme. “I don’t know that I’m necessarily, like, when I’m writing espousing a clear objective,” he says. Nor does he want his stories to be necessarily defined by their queerness. “I am interested in films that are incidentally queer,” he offers. “I think the more that we can normalise the full spectrum of human experience and queer experiences – and that includes having very flawed people as a mirror to reality – then to me, that’s progressive.”

Dennis, no one would argue, is a very flawed person. But, Sweeney suggests now, he no longer wastes much time on external opinions of the charatcer. “I’ll have my own take on it and I try to imbue empathy as a performer and as a director, as I do for all my characters, but ultimately you create art and you release it and for better or worse it’s no longer yours,” he says.

With Straight Up, he absorbed every piece of criticism; hey, at least it meant someone had watched his tiny indie movie. “This time around it’s like, I know people are watching the film so I feel a lot more comfortable tuning out.” Occasionally a friend will send him a funny Letterboxd comment about Twinless and he’ll laugh before erasing it from his mind. “I think that’s a difficult thing to navigate as an artist: how much do you want to be mindful of your audience, but balancing that with catering to them, because I think that can be a really dangerous foot in the water.”

Unless, of course, the comments are overwhelmingly positive. Hopefully, those ones stick around in his brain for a little while longer. After all, we’re all human, and we all enjoy validation. 

Twinless is in UK & Irish cinemas 6 February. For cinemas visit: PARK CIRCUS.

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