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As Matt and Greg Romano entered their mid-20s, they began to feel stuck. The identical twins, who are the sons of “Everybody Loves Raymond” star Ray Romano, had dropped out of college after barely giving it a try, then worked as production assistants on late night programs like “Jimmy Kimmel Live” and “The James Corden Show,” but none of their gigs seemed to be leading to a meaningful career. Plus, they still lived at home, in rooms filled with Yankees and Jets memorabilia and “Simpsons” figurines that had clearly been collected when they were teenagers. They knew they needed to shake things up, but they felt stuck.
That’s when Matt started a lengthy audition process for “Survivor,” only to get anxious about living that far off the grid. He decided to pull out at the last minute just when he was very close to becoming a contestant. As Matt struggled with feelings of failure, Ray Romano told his friend Mark Duplass about his twin sons’ failure to launch. It was Duplass who suggested having the brothers’ vlog about their lives, thinking it might turn into something bigger. If it did, he’d produce their movie.
“He basically just gave us a camera and said, ‘go out and see what you get.’ And we came back many, many years later,” Greg says. “I think he’d forgotten about us.”
It makes sense. This all started in 2018. The twins, in case you were wondering, don’t do things fast. But this Friday, “The Romano Twins,” a fly-on-the-wall documentary about their quarter-life crisis that is funny, candid, and moving, debuts at the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival. “It has been a long time coming,” Matt admits. “Working on this for years, there would be moments where you’d go, ‘let’s scrap the whole thing.’ But then you come back to it and realize there’s something here.”
When Matt and Greg were growing up, they operated as mirror images of each other. “Matt and I were very much always together, same classes, same friends. We had the same hobbies and interests,” Greg says. But sometimes they didn’t even recognize how in synch they were. “Our friends would have to tell us that we were best friends with each other,” Greg adds. “We didn’t see it.”
Ray Romano remembers a trip to Los Angeles he took with Greg while he was still an infant and the family was living in New York. It was Greg’s first time traveling without his brother. “We got to the hotel, room, and we’re unpacking our bags in one of them, and from the other room, we hear a clunk like a bang, and we go in, and we see Greg standing next to the full size mirror, and apparently he thought he saw Matt and ran into it.”
But over time that closeness had also helped insulate Matt and Greg from the world, preventing them from fully realizing their individual potential. In “The Romano Twins,” the brothers decide to strike out alone, to see how they fare without each other. Matt opted to take a trip into the Canadian wilderness with guides, looking to rough it “Survivor” style. And Greg decided to follow in his dad’s footsteps, trying out his standup act by traveling around the country and hitting up open mic nights.
Matt’s journey was more triumphant — he caught a fish and embraced being outdoors. But Greg’s was less of a success. He hit up one dive after another, telling jokes to patrons who weren’t really listening.
“I was so proud of myself,” Matt says. “But I realized that my goals were much easier. There was really no way Greg was gonna come back from his trip saying, ‘I did it. I did comedy, you know, like, I’m a successful comedian.”
“My standards are high for myself and with the background that I have, it just felt bad,” Greg admits. “Logically, I knew what I was doing was tough, but it felt much worse than I thought.”
Ray Romano, who understands the pain of just starting out in comedy, thinks his son was being too hard on himself after he watched the footage of Greg bombing on stage.
“I definitely don’t want to compare myself to LeBron James,” Ray Romano says, scrunching his face dismissively. “But if you look at his son, who’s on the Lakers, he’s going to be compared to his dad, of course. But the difference between Greg and LeBron’s son is he’s been playing basketball since he was two years old. Greg was starting stand up for the very first time. It’s not going to work your first time out.”
The brothers also understand that being the children of one of the most successful sitcom stars in history means that they enjoy enormous privilege. At one point in the film, Greg openly wonders if anyone is going to want to watch a documentary about “tubby nepo babies.”
“I told them that should be the title,” Ray Romano quips. “They weren’t tubby when the movie started. That’s how long it took.”
But there was a reason the brothers wanted to acknowledge their gilded safety net in a self-deprecating manner.
“I’m not going to be surprised if someone has said that about me or will say that about me,” Greg says. “At the end of the day, we kind of just shrug it off. We might as well joke about it.”
“The Romano Twins” uses Matt and Greg’s tight-knit bond to examine twin behavior more globally. The brothers end up attending “Twins Day Festival” in Twinsburg, Ohio, where they interview other identical twins. What they found was that all these twins talked about how they lived close together, shared the same passions, even worked the same jobs for the same companies.
“I don’t know if was validating to see it,” says Greg. “I did feel a connection to it.”
“Where you guys differ from them was they show each other that closeness,” Ray Romano interjects. “They express it. You guys try to deny it.”
For a time, “The Romano Twins” languished, left unfinished and neglected. There was a pandemic and then Matt moved in with his girlfriend. Life got in the way. It seemed like maybe “The Romano Twins” would be just another passion project that got abandoned or was left unrealized. But then, the pair returned to their hours of unedited footage, slowly piecing together the story of their lives. Having completed the film together, the duo feels like they have the ability to strike out on their own.
“I got married this year,” says Matt. “I moved away. We are living these separate lives. But not totally. Greg still lives three-quarters of a mile away with one of his friends. Our interests still overlap, so it’s not like we wanted to stop doing things together. The goal was just to ease up on some of the co-dependency. We wanted to do something without needing the other person to be there.”
English (US) ·