It started the way so many cultural rabbit holes do. A casual conversation. A strange visual. A question that won’t quite go away.
Inside the newsroom of TMZ, founder Harvey Levin sparked a discussion around a viral internet obsession: celebrity doppelgangers. Not just lookalikes, but historical doubles. Faces from centuries ago that look uncannily like today’s most famous stars.
The room quickly filled with examples. Old photographs and paintings side by side with modern celebrities.
Matthew McConaughey is compared to a 19th-century doctor. Justin Timberlake resembles an 1870s outlaw. Mark Zuckerberg is likened to a long-dead European king. Sylvester Stallone appears eerily similar to a Vatican-era pope. Jay-Z matched with a man photographed in 1939. Even Peter Dinklage lined up next to a court jester from the Spanish monarchy.
Some of the reactions were playful. Some skeptical. Some, openly unsettled.
Are these just coincidences? Simple genetics? Reincarnation? Time travel? Or something else entirely?
As the theories bounced around the room, one voice shifted the conversation in a direction few would expect in a TMZ newsroom.
Marah Williams, host of the Sistas Who Kill podcast, reached not for science fiction, but Scripture.
“In the Bible, in the book of Daniel, it talks about God having Watchers that walk among us that look just like us,” Williams said. “So there is a chance that these people have not aged because they are God’s Watchers.”
That single reference reframed the entire discussion.
Williams wasn’t arguing definitively that celebrities are ancient beings hiding in plain sight. She was doing something arguably more interesting: pointing out that the Bible already contains language and concepts that sound strikingly similar to the questions modern culture keeps circling back to.
Daniel 4:17, written more than 2,500 years ago, states in the Modern English Version:
‘This matter is by the decree of the watchers, and the demand by the word of the holy ones, in order that the living may know that the Most High rules over the kingdom of men and gives it to whomever He wills and sets up over it the basest of men.’
The verse is mysterious. It doesn’t fully explain who the watchers are or how they operate. It simply assumes their existence and authority under God’s sovereignty.
And that’s where the conversation gets uncomfortable in the best possible way.
For all our modern confidence, humanity is still asking the same questions it always has. Why do patterns repeat? Why do certain faces, figures and archetypes seem to reappear across centuries? Why does history sometimes feel less linear and more layered?
Most of the TMZ staff ultimately circled back to familiar explanations. There are only so many genes. Humans are bound to resemble one another. People have always been told they “look like someone else.”
All of that is reasonable.
But the moment lingers.
We live in a culture obsessed with conspiracies, simulations and multiverses; it’s more than a little wild that an ancient biblical text gets name-dropped as a possible framework for understanding it all. Not in a pulpit. Not in a church. But in a TMZ newsroom, surrounded by celebrity mug shots and historical paintings.
No one claimed to have the answer. That may be the point.
Maybe these are just doppelgangers. Maybe they aren’t. Maybe the Bible isn’t giving us neat explanations so much as reminding us that the world has always been more complex, more mysterious and more spiritually charged than we like to admit.
And maybe the strangest part isn’t that people see patterns where they may not exist.
Maybe it’s that, once again, Scripture seems to have already anticipated the questions culture is only now daring to ask.
James Lasher, a seasoned writer and editor at Charisma Media, combines faith and storytelling with a background in journalism from Otterbein University and ministry experience in Guatemala and the LA Dream Center. A Marine Corps and Air Force veteran, he is the author of The Revelation of Jesus: A Common Man’s Commentary and a contributor to Charisma magazine.
