Serious People and the power
of a good doppelgänger
March 20, 2026
by Joyce Keokham
If you want to see a “movie-long punchline,” watch Serious People. The satire film takes the discomfort of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal and transposes it onto the set of a Drake music video shoot. Written and directed by Pasqual Gutierrez and Ben Mullinkosson, the highly stylized film follows Gutierrez as he hires a doppelgänger to replace himself at work.
In real life, Gutierrez directs music videos with his business partner Raúl “RJ” Sanchez as a directing duo known as CLIQUA. Together, they have made music videos for artists including Bad Bunny, Travis Scott, and The Weeknd. Despite their commercial successes, the two Mexican-American directors are often mistaken for one another on set.
In Serious People, CLIQUA is asked to direct the next Drake music video but the shoot dates conflict with the due date of Gutierrez and his wife’s, Christine Yuan, first child. Gutierrez, not wanting to disappoint either of his partners (domestic or business) takes advantage of his low-profile and decides to hire an ill-qualified doppelgänger, by the name of Miguel, to take his place. As Miguel’s presence grows larger in the film, the rest of Gutierrez’s relationships fall apart.
With our upcoming issue of 4N themed on Alias, we got together with Pasqual Gutierrez and Ben Mullinkosson to discuss the making of their film.
Joyce Keokham: How do you two like to introduce yourself?
Pasqual Gutierrez: I am the writer, director, and lead of Serious People, my debut feature film made alongside my beloved friend Ben Mullinkosson.
Ben Mullinkosson: I’m a skateboarder and director living in Chengdu, China. I’ve been here for 10 years and I love it. I don’t think I’m going to leave.
JK: So the idea for Serious People came to Pasqual in a dream?
BM: [Pasqual] hit me up with a 10-minute long voice message about this dream—he was having a baby and felt like if he didn’t make this movie now, he would be making commercials for the rest of his life. I had just finished Last Year of Darkness, so I was trying to figure out the next project, too.
Our friends were like, “Let’s make this movie. Christine’s pregnant. We have to do this in six months otherwise she’s going to burst. This is our chance.” He sent me the idea in the summer, we started filming in December, then they had the baby in February. It was a really fast turnaround.
JK: At that stage, was it a real solution you wanted to explore, to be able to work through the birth of your child? Or was it more of a movie plot?
PG: The dream was very vivid, and I remember laughing a lot during it. I don’t know if I identified it as a movie, but rather some form of real-world social experiment that I was having fun with. As if I was living inside an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. When I woke up, Christine inspired me to make it a film.
BM: We wrote the script on a Google Doc, it was about 10 pages. We’d allot 0-2 minutes for one thing to happen, 2-4 minutes for another thing, and just have paragraphs of this with no dialogue—maybe we’d write a couple lines. Pasqual and I sent this back and forth and from there Teddy made the schedule.
We tried to make it as simple as possible, because we didn’t have many resources. We shot with two cameras when we could, if a free camera package was available that day. Usually our language was one super wide shot, like a surveillance camera like Roy Anderson’s framing, and then the other was super tight. Sometimes we would do a take and simplify the parts we liked. If Pasqual was in the scene, he would guide the person he’s talking to, getting them to the point.
JK: Are both happening simultaneously: a doppelgänger poses as Pasqual at work while Pasqual makes a film about it, or is the film an imagination of how it would have gone?
BM: There was a version that was pure documentary, what it would look like if Miguel actually worked as Pasqual. But because of Christine’s availability and timeline with the baby coming, we had to plan it out more and then it became fiction. It was both of our first fiction films but I still think of it as a documentary.
On a surface level people understand documentaries, but there’s many forms of what non-fiction storytelling can look like. There hasn’t been a film about music video directors that I’ve seen. There’s films about directors, but music videos are so specific.
JK: Since everyone in the film portrays themselves—Christine is a commercial director, and Pasqual and Raul are the directing duo CLIQUA—were there any concerns that the film could impact your careers or relationships outside of the film?
PG: Christine and Raul both became very upset with me. At different times, I had to have very long conversations with them about the film and how it negatively impacted them. Neither conversation was fun, and both instilled quite a bit of doubt within me. Ben kept me focused on the film and we felt we needed to press on, hoping things would work out in the end. Once we got into Sundance, I think everyone fully forgave me.
BM: There was some strategy too. Drake has beef with Kendrick and The Weekend. As directors that are already associated with The Weekend, CLIQUA wouldn’t direct for Drake. That was kind of the decision there and we thought Drake would like the film because he’s kind of self-aware.
JK: The Drake lookalike in the film is really convincing. How did you find him?
PG: Waju found him on Twitter! He was perfect. We DMed him, called him, and flew him out to LA. When he walked onto set everyone was blown away.
BM: After we wrapped him, Jeison Perez is his name, he went to Hollywood and Highland, where all the Hollywood stars are. He’s walking around, taking pictures, and posting to TikTok. It went viral, people were like, “Oh, Drake is in town, walking around.” And it’s just him—Jeison Perez from Miami.
JK: That’s hilarious. Was there any legal pushback from having someone else portray Drake?
BM: I mean, it’s satire. As far as I know Drake hasn’t seen the movie yet, but I really wonder what he would say about it because we are complimenting him. In my eyes, anyway.
JK: There was originally an alternative ending. Can you share more about that?
PG: The alternative ending was much more ambitious: After the Drake incident, Miguel reaches his final form, hosting after hours parties with bottle service, touting that he’s a viral sensation. He has a girlfriend named Christine who looks uncannily similar to my wife Christine, and I’m fed up with it.
We end up getting into a physical fight and I’m left lost in this blurry nightclub. I run into a number of friends, all seen earlier in the film, but they no longer recognize me. It leaves the film on a much sadder, more surreal note about replaceability. Ultimately we scrapped it though because it was too ambitious for the film. We couldn’t get enough extras to make the party feel impressive, and the scenes really started to fall apart. Cool idea on paper, though!
JK: In real life, Miguel is younger and less established than everyone else. Did he have any reservations about how his character is portrayed in the film?
PG: Of all the characters in the film, he genuinely aspires to become an actor. You could argue that Miguel is the only true “actor” in the whole film, since everyone else plays a version of their real self. Miguel, on the other hand, is playing a completely fictional character.
BM: He is playing kind of an evil character when he’s actually really kind and hardworking.
JK: He’d probably never punch Drake.
BM: Yeah. But he is actually a boxer.
JK: I heard there is going to be a spiritual sequel for Serious People. What does that entail?
PG: It’s called One of Us, and it will star me, Christine, and our daughter, Echo. After blowing up my music video career, I moved the family to the woods hoping to reinvent a new life rooted in American trad-family values. I become obsessed with homesteading, a growing off-grid culture in the states. Just as I begin to settle into rustic life, a major Hollywood production rolls into town and turns everything upside down. There will also be a number of exciting celebrity cameos and a few other surprises. We’re still putting all the financing together for it though, so if anyone reading this has some money...give me a call.
BM: Pasqual is doing that one without me. It’s really funny, and I’m excited to see it. Next, I’m working on a feature called FUCK BOY and it’s about my fuckboy skater friends in Chengdu. It’s kind of like Serious People, how it’s based on real life. I wrote FUCK BOY with Michael Barth, another friend from Chapman University, then we shot in August. We didn’t need much financing because everyone is real and plays themselves.
JK: How did you get involved in a film about LA music video directors?
BM: I used to live in LA. Pasqual and I went to film school at Chapman University together. In 2014 or 2015, we lived together on the east side of LA with a bunch of other people, including Teddy Lee, the producer of Serious People, and Waju Broderick, our associate producer, sound mixer, and musician (he made our fake Drake track). It was a really fun time. We had big ideas, but we didn’t really have any resources. Eventually I moved to China and Pasqual stayed in LA.
PG: We met in a documentary film class where our objective was to make a short documentary about a neighborhood in Los Angeles. I did East LA and I remember Ben really liked it. It was a big deal to me because I thought Ben was the coolest, most talented documentary filmmaker in the entire school. Since then we remained within each other’s orbits. Life took us in different directions, but when the idea for Serious People came to me, I knew he was the only one I’d want to make this with.
JK: I notice you like to work in directing partnerships. How did this preference develop? Should the industry move away from singular auteurs?
PG: I firmly believe in duos and co-direction, especially because filmmaking is such a collaborative medium. Sometimes it annoys me that directors get the most credit because the best part of a film isn’t just the direction; it’s the writing, the cast, the setting, the design, the cinematography, the way the film is put together in the edit. During prep and production, you bounce ideas off everyone working on the film, which affects the overall direction. I do think, however, that single auteurs are still important! It just depends on the project.
JK: Where can we watch Serious People?
BM: It’s on Amazon. Maybe it’s on Canopy. Maybe it’s on iTunes. And then we’re going to go onto a couple other platforms in March, but the official announcement hasn’t come out yet, so I won't say it—We’re gonna be on Mubi in March.