If you want a severe case of ’90s nostalgia, look no further then It Takes Two! The 1995 movie was pretty much Disney’s Parent Trap but with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and no Lindsay Lohan in sight. No, seriously, the plot follows lookalikes (not actually twins) Alyssa and Amanda as they meet at summer camp and decide to switch lives.
Alyssa comes from an extremely wealthy family thanks to her billionare father Roger (played by Steve Guttenberg), and Amanda is an orphaned girl whose closest guardian is a charming social worker named Diane (played by Kirstie Alley). The girls decide to play matchmaker between their guardians in order to stop Alyssa’s father from marrying gold-digger socialite Clarice (played by Jane Sibbett). Keep reading to uncover what the cast of It Takes Two is up to now.
Following Mary-Kate and Ashley’s shared role as Michelle Tanner on Full House, the iconic sitcom that ran from 1987 to 1995, the twins had extremely successful acting careers in their teen years, producing nearly 17 movies. They stepped away from the limelight in the later 2000s to work in the fashion industry, which Mary-Kate credits is partly due to the fact that they “were raised to be discreet people.”
Mary-Kate and Ashley, who rarely give interviews, sat down with Vice’s i-D Magazine in May 2021 to commemorate the 15th anniversary of their fashion brand, The Row.
“We really didn’t want to be in front of it,” Ashley said of being the faces of their brand. “We didn’t necessarily even want to let people know it was us, in a way. I mean, it was one of those things where it was really about the product, to the point where we’re like, ‘Who could we get to kind of front this so we don’t have to?’ I think, to this day, you’ll see we really put the product first.”
In the past, the two have talked about their decision to quit acting. Mary-Kate told Allure magazine in 2013 that she is “not great at not being able to control the end product.”
Mary-Kate agreed with her sister in the same interview. “I was reading scripts, and ultimately I just said to the people who were representing me, ‘I need to do things 100%. I don’t feel like I can give you 100% of my time,’ ” she recalled. “There’s a lot of compromise in the entertainment industry. I can’t sit in this room and audition for this part.”
Click through the gallery below to see what the entire cast of It Takes Two is up to now.
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