Snoop Dogg was everywhere during his visit to Melbourne as the headliner for the AFL grand final pre-game show – so much so that you might have wondered if there were two of him.
Well, there were. Sort of.
Snoop Dogg performs at the AFL grand final.Credit: AFL Photos
In Melbourne at the same time as the 53-year-old rapper was the man dubbed his “official doppelganger”, Eric Finch. Like matter and anti-matter, or the two Captain Kirks in that famous episode of Star Trek, everything would be fine, so long as they never came together.
Finch is a 57-year-old former Marine who was working in “talent relations” in LA nightclubs when people began pointing out his uncanny resemblance to the rapper. By 2017, he had signed with a talent agency and was stepping out as a plausible (if somewhat shorter) simulacrum of Snoop, appearing in ads, music videos, and movies as the rapper’s stand-in. In 2020, Finch was admitted to SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ guild, on the strength of this work.
Eric Finch, the “authorised doppelganger” of Snoop Dogg, was in Melbourne at the same time as the real deal.
“I don’t know what happened,” he told 10 News on Friday, when asked how it all came to pass. “I just got blessed, and next thing you know, I look like him, or rather he looks like me.”
Though Snoop is an absolute master of commercial deals, he apparently gets no cut of Finch’s earnings. But he has given his blessing to having his lookalike step out in his stead.
This week, for instance, while Snoop was busy with his AFL-related appearances, Finch was doing duty for wine brand 19 Crimes, part of the Treasury Wine Estates stable, in his place (Snoop appears as one of the criminals featured on the labels).
Finch was flown out by the marketing agency Bolster specifically to capitalise on Snoop’s presence in the city, popping up with glasses of the good stuff here and there, surprising punters on the streets and in bottle shops, and generally leading people to believe they had seen the hip-hop superstar when actually they hadn’t.