An Ohio man stumbled across his doppelgänger while day drinking in a Las Vegas pool on vacation with some of his buddies. He posted about the chance encounter on Reddit, where it got upvoted almost 100K times.
Sean Douglas McArdle went to Las Vegas for his buddy Dan's 40th birthday party. While lounging in the pool at the Hotel Flamingo on August 20, McArdle soon became the center of attention.
"Everybody on the opposite side pointed at me laughing and I just got a little embarrassed," the 46-year-old professor at Kent State University told TODAY. "I look back at my friends and they're pointing at some other dude and laughing. I look over and it was like looking in the mirror. I've seen guys who've had similarities to me, but man, this guy just looked just like me. It was pretty surreal."
McArdle quickly swam over to meet his doppelgänger. Over the years, many people have commented that his celeb twin is Seth Rogen, so that was one of the many thoughts that was running in his head.
"I asked him, 'Are you Seth Rogen?' He chuckled."
The pair even were wearing similar hats, and almost the exact same pair of glasses.
"I was the only person in the whole pool wearing glasses," McArdle said. "I get weirded out if I can't see and I'm around a bunch of strangers, so I just kept my glasses on in the pool. He did, too."
McArdle didn't get the man's name. Later that day, he posted about the chance encounter on Reddit, his social media platform of choice. Eleven days later, it's been upvoted 95,000 times with 2,300 comments.
McArdle is a dad to two teens — 13 and 17 — and he said his kids both had differing reactions to the viral meeting of the Rogen lookalikes.
"My youngest thought it was pretty funny," he shared. "I finally have something that has more views than she does from TikTok. She gets millions of views on goofy things she posts on TikTok. So, a little bit of a competition there."
His oldest had a different reaction to the photo.
"My 17-year-old, COVID hit at a weird time for him and his life," McArdle said. "So he's kind of having some social anxiety and stuff. He was having like secondhand social anxiety when he saw it, seeing two complete strangers so close to one another."
McArdle said he has discovered something about the way he navigates social media platforms like Reddit where anonymity can be sought after: Personal accountability is key.
"After my divorce, I started trying to self-actualize and I kind of used Reddit and Facebook to do that," he said. "One of the things I did was I dropped usernames and just used my own name, because it made me more accountable. It made me responsible for whatever I posted."
"There's only one Sean Douglas McArdle."
Related video: