Alison Jackson is a British photographer, known for staging photos of celebrity/royal look-alikes. As in, she hired models or normal people who sort of look like various celebrities or royals and she stages photoshoots. She’s 65 years old and she’s been doing this for decades. Incidentally, when I was looking for photos of Jackson, one of the first ones to pop up was a 2013 pic she took with Ghislaine Maxwell. They were both attending a performance by the National Youth Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall. Fascinating, huh? Well, Jackson is making headlines this week for what she said about British people’s favorite subject: Prince Harry and Meghan. Obviously, Jackson was speaking to Richard Eden at the Daily Mail:
Bafta-winning photographer Alison Jackson – who specialises in amusing images featuring lookalikes of the rich, famous and powerful – is planning to stage a show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival later this month. She has, however, encountered a serious problem.
The show was due to include doppelgangers of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, but Jackson has failed to cast actors to play them with little more than a fortnight until the curtain goes up.
‘I have a couple of ‘Prince Williams’ who’ve come forward and they look quite good, but no ‘Meghan’ or ‘Harry’ has turned up,’ she tells me. The artist, 65, claims this is because the Sussexes have become such toxic figures that no one wants to play them.
‘I think that people don’t like Meghan, they don’t trust her and they think she’s an operator who sucks everything she can out of Harry,’ Jackson claims. She explains that her lookalikes ‘tend to relate to’ the person they are playing.
Jackson blames Harry’s explosive interview with the BBC in May after he lost a legal challenge over his taxpayer-funded security in Britain. The California-based prince said the King ‘won’t speak to me because of this security stuff’, but that he did not want to fight any more and did ‘not know how much longer my father has’.
Jackson tells me: ‘He’s gone too far, because every time he does a TV interview he takes some dig at King Charles, which is below the belt and beyond the pale and people don’t like it. He implied that his father might die.’
She previously had lookalikes of Harry, 40, and Meghan, who turned 44 yesterday, but says ‘they now won’t come forward’.
Jackson adds: ‘As Meghan gets more and more assertive, the lookalikes disappear. They’ve probably all cut their hair short and look different.’
On the subjects of look-alikes… I’ve seen some of the staged photos done by other photographers, and they tend to just cast whatever redheaded man they find for Harry. They don’t actually seek to find people who actually look like Harry and Meghan, both of whom are very attractive. It certainly feels like if there are women who actually look like Meghan, they probably don’t want to participate in something tacky like this. Ditto with the Harry look-alikes. The guys who look like William probably have nothing better to do. Anyway, the way these people obsess over the Sussexes is really something.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
