'Us' Has A Totally Unexpected Connection To 'Friends' That Will Make You Scream
It is hard to imagine that a sweet and silly sitcom like Friends would have anything in common with Jordan Peele's latest bone-chilling, gory horror movie Us, but the two projects actually share some major stars. Even the most fanatic Friends superfan would never be able to recognize Ross and Rachel's baby nowadays, so it is no wonder why fans are shocked to learn that the twins in Us played Emma on Friends. Looks like Dylan and Cole Sprouse are not the only famous former Friends babies anymore!
Twin actors Cali and Noelle Sheldon scored their first major movie role in the recently released Us, but this was actually not their first buzzy acting job. That came when the twins were not even one-year-old yet: they portrayed Ross and Rachel's newborn daughter Emma in the final three seasons of Friends. It is customary for TV sitcoms to cast twins in young child roles to lessen their time on set, as Friends also did with Ross' son Ben, who was played by Dylan and Cole Sprouse. Cali and Noelle Sheldon appeared in a total of eight Friends episodes as Emma, spanning the show's eighth, ninth, and tenth seasons from 2003 to 2004.
Since their Friends days, Cali and Noelle Sheldon have appeared in a handful of shorts, but nothing that has received a widespread release until their roles in Us. They play Becca and Lindsey Tyler in the movie, the twin daughters of Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker's bougie beachside couple Kitty and Josh Tyler.
The twins appear early in Us and poke fun at Jason, the young son of Lupita Nyong'o and Winston Duke's central characters Adelaide and Gabe Wilson. It appears that Becca and Lindsey are just your run-of-the-mill spoiled teenagers at first, but Cali and Noelle Sheldon get much more to do as the movie progresses.
Spoiler alert: This paragraph includes spoilers for Us. In the middle of the movie, Becca and Lindsey are quickly dispatched with by their own doppelgängers, a pair of shrieking acrobats named Io and Nix. The dual roles allow Cali and Noelle Sheldon to show two completely different sides of their acting capabilities, going from disaffected, rich-kid teens to demonic murderesses. This is also when it becomes the most shocking to remember that yes, this is little baby Emma from Friends flipping around a beach house and stabbing people with giant scissors.
The characters also stand out in the movie since they are twins, and Us is obviously all about identical clones. Cali and Noelle Sheldon have been sharing photos of themselves with their Us co-stars while doing press for the movie this past week on their Instagram accounts:
Although Becca and Lindsey are definitely not the main characters of Us, they do play a notable role, and it is pretty mind-boggling to think of the twin teenagers as the newborn baby from the final seasons of Friends. Yeah, I definitely feel super old now.
Us is out now in movie theaters across the United States.
