Joe Keery Jokes He 'Came in Third' at His Own Lookalike Contest
Joe Keery isn't looking like himself lately.
During a recent appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Tuesday, Jan. 28, the Stranger Things actor, 32, talked about the rise in popularity of celebrity lookalike contests. After one was held to find his own lookalike, host Jimmy Fallon asked how it felt to be the subject of it.
'These guys came in a tie, Troy and Max,' Fallon, 50, said, holding up a photo of the winners. "Congratulations."
'I'm happy for them. I was third,' Keery quipped.
'Well, you tried,' Fallon then teased. 'Yeah, but you don't quite look like you, so that's a bummer.'
Related: Joe Keery Addresses 'Emotional' End of Stranger Things: 'It's Been One-Third of My Life'
Keery joked that he even got a reward for the ranking. 'I got a gift card. Like a $5 gift card to an Arby's or something,' he said.
As for Troy and Max, Keery didn't know what they got in exchange for the big win, but Fallon noted that they did get to appear on The Tonight Show. 'That's kind of a good prize!' he said.
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The lookalike contest trend began in October 2024, when a YouTube creator named Anthony Po — who posts online under the name AnthPo — posted 100 flyers around New York City inviting anyone who resembled Timothée Chalamet to participate in a competition in Washington Square Park. The event garnered mass attention from fans of the actor, leading to thousands showing up that day and the Little Women star himself crashing the party.
After making headlines around the world, the trend picked up: Paul Mescal lookalikes braved the cold Dublin air in November wearing short shorts to mimic one of the actor's signature styles, while Zayn Malik doppelgänger Shiv Patel won a free tattoo from artist Hel Hart after winning the competition in Brooklyn on Nov. 17.
Related: See Celebrities Side-by-Side with Their Lookalike Contest Winner, from Timothée Chalamet to Drake
Jeremy Allen White lookalike Ben Shabad won Chicago's contest only to be met with a swarm of fans the next time he left the house.
"I went out in the city with some of my friends for the first time since I won the competition on Saturday, and everybody at the bars and at the restaurant was waving to me and asking me to take pictures," he told PEOPLE in late November.
Related: Viral Celebrity Lookalike Contests Spawn Stars in Their Own Right — but How Long Can They Ride on Resemblance? (Exclusive)
When Glen Powell couldn't make it to his lookalike competition in Austin, Texas, he sent his mom, Cyndy Powell, to be a judge. But Glen still made a cameo at the event, offering the winner's parents to be in his next film.
'In all seriousness, I have assembled you here today for an important mission. I want to pull off a heist, and we don't need masks because we all have the same face. It's the perfect crime! They can't get all of us because we are one: a criminal Glenterprise," the Twisters star began in his video message.
'You may know that my parents make a cameo in every movie I make, but today the winner of the Glen Powell lookalike contest wins their parents, or any family member of their choice, a cameo in my next movie,' he said. 'I am completely serious. This is a cash-value prize of $6 billion.'
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Friendly blue eyes, though they aren't focused on me. Photograph: Darrell Jackson I'm here to talk to Minor about his unusual career trajectory (do you know any other world-class swimmers who left the sport to go make video games?), but he doesn't want to stay in his apartment. He wants to go get pizza, and there's a spot nearby he's never been to. 'The reviews look great,' he assures me. We walk out the door, and he leads the way: left at the grocery store, right at the corner, another right at the wine bar. A woman waiting at a crosswalk looks at Minor, then at his white cane, and stares for a moment, before shouting past me, over the noise of the traffic, in a tone she probably intends to sound encouraging: 'You sure are brave to cross this intersection like that.' 'What other choice do I have?' Minor replies, and smiles. The woman doesn't answer. She looks away. Minor is still smiling. Ross Minor wasn't born blind. One night in 2006, as he and his older brother slept in their bedroom, his father, angry after being threatened with a divorce, walked in and shot Minor and his brother in the head. Then he turned the gun on himself. Minor woke up in the hospital, where he was told that his brother and father were both dead. Minor couldn't see the person who told him this. The bullet had passed through Minor's right temple and out the other side of his head, lodging itself in the palm of his hand. On its way, it destroyed his left eye and cut the nerve of his right, leaving him completely blind. He had just celebrated his eighth birthday. Minor, who is now 27, probably tells some version of this story a couple times a week. (He often warns people beforehand that it's upsetting.) It's also on his website, which is linked in his many social accounts. He knows people are curious, and he doesn't mind answering their questions. How do you read online reviews? A screen reader. How do you get around? A cane, and sometimes a guide dog. Can you really play video games? Yes. Sometimes. Depends on the game. In fact, Minor has not only figured out how to play (certain) video games. He's trying to build a career with a singular goal: to make it so blind people can play any game they want. To the outsider, this sounds nonsensical. The 'video' part of 'video game' comes from the Latin for 'see.' Isn't it a bit unreasonable, expecting such a visual medium to be made blind-accessible? But Minor is making progress. He's even becoming something of a celebrity in his field, with some impressive credits to his name: He consulted on Rare's Sea of Thieves and the Xbox game As Dusk Falls , narrated the audio description track for Netflix's Avatar: The Last Airbender , and is now working on a number of titles from well-known studios whose names I can't print, due to nondisclosure agreements. Because of people like him, and a handful of sympathetic allies in the industry, there are now more options for blind gamers than ever. Minor devotes most of his time to this work, something that not every blind or disabled person would be able to do. As Minor puts it, he is in a 'privileged position': Back when he was shot by his father, people weren't quite as desensitized to gun violence, he says, and news about family-annihilation cases wasn't so routine. People cared more. Local fundraising efforts established a college fund for him, with a small amount for emergencies. Still, he struggles. Being disabled is expensive, and even with his various odd jobs in the video game industry, Minor still relies on survivor benefits, Social Security, and food stamps. In other words, he can barely afford to do this work at all. But he insists that he's lucky to be able to try. At the pizza place, Minor asks me to read the menu for him. If I wasn't here, he'd have used an app on his phone that scans text and reads it aloud. It'd probably be faster that way—I've heard Minor use the app at other times, and he cranks the speed up so high that my ears only hear a spiky torrent of consonants. He'd have 'seen' the whole menu by the time I finished dictating the appetizer section. It later occurs to me that sometimes when Minor asks a sighted person for help, it might actually be for our sake: to let us feel useful and included. One of the first things you'll notice about Minor is a massive blue Gyarados tattoo on his right arm. It holds a few layers of meaning. Visually, a powerful water beast with wings makes sense for a swimmer. Minor picked up swimming during middle school, and he ended up being so good at it he earned a spot on the US Paralympic team. (When I first met him, in 2020, he was training for the Tokyo Olympics—a trip that never happened because he dropped out after what he describes as a long period of depression.) Photograph: Darrell Jackson Photograph: Darrell Jackson But the tattoo's bigger meaning is more straightforward: Gyarados is a Pokémon, and the Pokémon video games changed Minor's life. It began in the hospital, as he recovered. 'I still don't remember the specific day,' he says, setting down a slice of pizza. 'It very much feels like a dream. But I remember one of my friends would visit me from school, and I just wanted to talk to him about Pokémon . So he would play his game for me next to the bed, and I would listen, and I realized that sometimes I could tell what was going on.' Pokémon was probably not designed to be blind-friendly. Instead, it's what might be called 'accidentally accessible.' Each Pokémon has a completely unique cry, a noise it makes when it's summoned for battle. Bird-type Pokémon might have light and airy chiptune glissandos, while heavier rock-type ones tend more toward bass-heavy beeps and booms. Minor had already sunk hours into his own copy of Pokémon Ruby , so he recognized some of the cries from memory. When Minor left the hospital, he and his mother moved into his grandparents' home. 'My mom brought over all my belongings and Ruby ,' he says. At first, he had a cousin play for him, and he would listen and explain what to do. Then he asked for the game. He wanted to try for himself. This is where the most important part of Pokémon 's accidental accessibility comes in: the bumps. When walking around in the overworld map, if your character runs into a wall, it makes a characteristic bump sound. Anyone who's ever played the game probably heard the noise just now in their head. It's simple, but it meant that Minor could walk around in the game, navigating by 'feel.' Push up three times: nothing, nothing, bump . Hm. Push right: bump . Push left: bump . OK, this is a dead end. Turn around. For a while after the shooting, Minor was afraid of adults. He would only talk to other children or his mother. Then, around the time Minor was relearning to play Pokémon , an elderly tutor came to visit him. 'He gave me my first cane, but I wouldn't even come out from under a blanket to say hi to him,' Minor says. 'So he put the cane under the blanket so I could feel it. He was the one who showed me how to use it.' Next came the lessons. Once a week, the tutor would pull Minor out of class and they'd do an activity. One of his favorites was the clock game. The tutor would hide a wind-up clock somewhere, and Minor would have to find it by listening to the soft ticking. Minor learned to navigate new spaces by exploring them, gently bumping into walls and making mental maps. The experience felt familiar. Almost like Pokémon . Then an odd thing happened: The real world got easier to navigate, but the worlds of video games did not. When in-game dialog boxes appeared, Minor would have to ask friends on the playground to read him the words. (Kids aren't jaded yet, Minor observes now. They don't mind.) Often, Minor found himself being talked about as an 'inspiration'—for overcoming a tragic event, for playing sports, for playing guitar. But all Minor really wanted to talk about, then as now, were video games. And most of the games his friends were raving about were, for him, completely unplayable. Even Pokémon got harder, as later iterations transitioned from grid-based 2D views to three dimensions. Every so often, though, there were exceptions. 'What really opened my eyes to what gaming could be was Left 4 Dead 2, ' Minor says. He still remembers the day: on a friend's couch in high school, playing the 'Dark Carnival' level. Usually, his friends spent the game protecting him, but this level proved to be too much for them. Zombies swarmed the arena. So Minor began listening for enemies and swinging his melee weapon. After an intense few minutes, he heard the sound of the level ending. 'My friends were like, 'Holy shit, Ross! You saved us!'' 'Dude, I loved that game,' he tells me. 'I don't want anyone's pity. But, like, because of how inaccessible the world is, I'm always asking for help. So to actually help others, instead of being the one needing them—like, that's a really, really cool feeling.' In his early teens, Minor stumbled across an online forum for blind gamers. Before this, Minor would buy a game like one buys a lottery ticket, with the odds he'd be able to play it only slightly better. But here was a community—comparing notes, sharing workarounds, or just venting. Minor told every friend he could, though he assumed sighted gamers wouldn't care. He'd tried writing emails to his favorite game studios, asking them to add features, volunteering to help them playtest. Occasionally he would get a courtesy email back: We'll think about it. 'Other times,' Minor says, 'I pour my heart out, and then I'd get an automated response.' Then, in his senior year of high school, Minor posted to the Ask Me Anything subreddit, offering to talk about how he navigated life as a blind person. He expected people to be interested in how he played sports. To his surprise, more people seemed fascinated by the fact that he'd learned to play, yes, video games. At the request of multiple commenters, he managed to post a recording of himself playing Mortal Kombat X . Someone then offered to raise money for Minor to buy an Xbox One so he could stream online. He accepted. Thus Minor's YouTube channel was born, with a dual purpose: on the one hand, to offer tips for other blind gamers on how to navigate games; on the other, to be a public advocate for blind-accessible games. His following started to grow. (His YouTube channel now has more than 33,000 subscribers.) Perhaps because of this, developers started asking Minor to advise them on making their games more accessible. Minor realized that his lived experience might not be enough. He needed to know more about the craft. He bought books on game design and devoured them. He got every certificate he could think of. He found mentors who had been in the accessibility world longer than he had and asked for advice. He taught himself to program. This was around the time Minor qualified for the Paralympics. I ask if he ever thought about using that as a platform. Go get a medal and then advocate for his gaming hobby? People listen to athletes. Minor shakes his head. 'It's still not equal for us,' he says. 'The Paralympics happens a month after the Olympics. And after the Olympics is over, nobody cares.' He adds: 'Reach is what I care about. Reach is what matters.' But more importantly, Minor wasn't passionate about swimming. He was passionate about video games. And to hear Minor tell it, getting people to care about blind-accessible video games is a harder and more complicated task than Olympic-level swimming. Photograph: Darrell Jackson Most modern video games are built atop existing 'engines'—a set of tools that provide basic gameplay mechanics. If you want to make a first-person shooter, you don't have to code your shooter's gait or the concept of 'gravity' from scratch. Everything from Fortnite to Pokémon Go runs on these engines, and they formed the base tech for around 90 percent of the games released on Steam in 2024. In theory, these engines could include built-in components for blind gamers: automatic screen-reader integrations, sonar-like environment-sensing toolkits. But there are no real industry standards for such features. As it stands, the handful of games that are truly blind-accessible—like The Last of Us 2 , considered at the time of its release the gold standard—are built fully in-house, with proprietary engines; and there is no financial incentive to share designs with other companies. So, how do you disrupt decades of industry inertia? A lot of patience, Minor says. He observes how other disability activists have done it for generations before him: You smile a lot and explain the same thing over and over and over again. Minor's first 'job' was on Madden NFL 18 —he gave his feedback on a controller rumble feature and led a workshop. His name isn't in the credits, and he received no money, only a tour of the offices and a signed copy of the game. (The devs did ask him to do more consulting work, but he passed the gig to a friend; Minor doesn't care for football.) Though things have improved a bit, this isn't unusual for the industry. Game studios often dangle 'consulting' gigs at disabled gamers, only to sit them down with a controller, ask them questions for an hour, and then send them on their way with a gift card. Minor says he was once asked by a AAA game studio to travel across town to their offices to playtest a game—but the payment offered was so low that it wouldn't even cover the Uber ride. It's a delicate dance. Minor, as well as other disability advocates I've spoken to—whether for blind or low-vision gamers, those with mobility or cognitive disabilities, or others—are sometimes hesitant to call out studios they've had bad experiences with. 'There's a sense that you shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you,' Minor says. The concern, in other words, is that if disabled people are seen as being 'ungrateful' for what they've been 'given,' companies will simply turn their backs on them. Beyond that, it's not enough to simply be good at a consulting job. To keep convincing game studios that accessibility is a worthwhile investment, one also has to be an 'advocate,' and this means being a public figure. Or, in more relevant terms, an influencer. This tricky landscape was something that one of Minor's mentors was an expert at navigating. Brandon Cole, better known online as Superblindman, was one of the industry's best-known blind accessibility consultants. He made a name for himself by being not only relentlessly friendly and optimistic but also phenomenal at his job. When Xbox announced that its flagship racing game Forza Motorsport would be fully playable by blind gamers, nobody was surprised that Cole had been involved. Cole also worked on The Last of Us 2 . He posted regularly on social media, spoke at events, and streamed on Twitch, all in the service of bringing awareness to the cause. Cole died of cancer in 2024. Minor, like most of the community, was gutted. He had lost someone he considered a friend and mentor. He also knew that he would be expected to step up and help continue the work that Cole left behind. Did I mention that Minor is funny? I know it's a bit of a cliché to say this about a disabled person, but please indulge me here: Ross Minor is absolutely hilarious. As we walk home from the pizza spot, talking excitedly, I duck under a tree branch. Minor … doesn't. He smacks right into it. I feel terrible: I should have warned him. He shakes his head. 'Only thing worse than being a blind guy,' he says, spitting out an actual leaf, 'is being a six-foot-two blind guy.' My favorite kind of joke: the sharp, uncomfortable kind that hinges on an experience your audience will never understand. The kind I occasionally tell in front of my white friends to watch them squirm, unsure if they're allowed to laugh with me. I look at Minor: He's giving me the same grin he gave the lady at the crosswalk. I finally break down and laugh. Ross, you motherfucker. Minor moved to Los Angeles three years ago, from Colorado, thinking it might help his career. And it has—up to a point. 'Things have started to pick up for me when it comes to consulting and different gigs,' he says. 'I feel like I'm really getting traction.' But because so much of his success is tied to his YouTube channel, other problems arise. 'Video editing is not accessible,' he says. 'Creating thumbnails—you know, they say that's the hook, right?—that stuff's not accessible.' Then there's the pressure to go viral. Recently, Minor uploaded a video of himself beating a boss in God of War: Ragnarok. It's pretty impressive: a professionally edited split screen with footage of his gameplay, combined with his voiceover explaining how the sound cues work. After a play-by-play of his finishing move, he speaks into the camera: 'Gameplay is for everyone, and now you see.' The video flopped. 'Not even a thousand views,' Minor says. 'Meanwhile, I post a video about how I go down an escalator with my guide dog: 10,000 views.' He laughs, but he's obviously frustrated. 'Like, yeah, it gives people the warm fuzzies, like, 'Oh, wow, he's so inspirational.' But that's not the point.' We're back at Minor's house now, where he's showing me his computer setup. Minor streams on Twitch regularly; he only took a break from streaming in January when the Los Angeles fires threatened his apartment. (He didn't realize how close the fires were until someone told him—the bullet that took his vision also took out olfactory nerves, so he couldn't smell the smoke.) He gestures toward his desk. He's got a nice DSLR camera perched on a tripod, a ring light, a microphone. 'A lot of this was given to me by the MrBeast foundation,' he says, referring to the nonprofit Beast Philanthropy, founded by its namesake, the famous YouTuber occasionally criticized for videos some people find exploitative. Minor admits he feels a little conflicted about getting such expensive items for free, but he's also realistic. 'It's given me a lot of opportunities,' he says, 'especially with my audio description work.' Minor does everything he can to make his Twitch streams look good for his sighted viewers. He sets up multicolored lights in the background, and he pays a small monthly fee for a service that makes them interactive—people in the Twitch chat can change the colors with a text command. Then there's the 'Dixie Cam,' an auxiliary camera pointed at his guide dog, Dixie. She's a friendly black lab who seems to think of Minor's streams as an opportunity to catch up on sleep. Photograph: Darrell Jackson Minor occasionally even coordinates his outfits so that they stand out against the background. 'I'm just checking to see what color my shirt is today,' he says. 'I think it's white.' He points his phone camera at himself, and a rapid-fire voice shouts a description into his ear. 'Oh, it's black. Well, there you go,' he shrugs, and chuckles. Today, he's playing two games, The Last of Us 2 and God of War: Ragnorok . Midway through the first, as his character crawls through an abandoned storefront, Minor starts to answer messages from the chat. 'What are the best games for PS5 for blind people?' he reads. He's gotten this one before, but he answers it anyway. 'Obviously the Last of Us games—wait, is this a rifle?' A pause while he listens to the screen reader. 'Aw yeah.' He picks up the weapon, and as he does so, he hears the groan of a zombie in the distance. He stands up and headshots the enemy from across the room. He goes back to responding to the chat: ' … then Spider-Man 2 . Also As Dusk Falls . That's both an accessible game and I advised on that.' He also shouts out God of War: Ragnarok , but with a caveat: 'If you have a sighted person around occasionally, that would go a long way.' He's not kidding. Half an hour after switching over to God of War , he gets stuck. Minor had been absolutely plowing through the game, using sound cues to mow down enemies, jump over obstacles, dodge projectiles. But now his session has come to an abrupt halt. 'Hey guys,' he says, talking to the handful of people in the chat. 'Uh … did my computer freeze?' It did not. His character is simply dangling from a ledge, and there is no sound to indicate what is going on. Minor has come up against the only foe he can't beat: silence. Without a cue to let him know he can safely drop down, he's stuck. In that moment, I think about another game, Sea of Thieves, in which teams form pirate crews and rove around in the ocean. It seems like it would be unplayable for a blind person. And for the person steering the boat, it largely was, because the sea is full of randomly placed rocks. Then Minor sat down with the developers and suggested they add a setting to amplify the volume of the crashing waves, and put it in stereo. Now he could hear rocks, and what side they were approaching from. If you've played Sea of Thieves with strangers, there's a chance the player driving the boat was blind. Minor's work often involves stuff like this: cleaning up a well-intended dev's mess; proposing an elegant (read: inexpensive) way to add accessibility to a game that was not created with him in mind. Minor doesn't want to dumb down a game, even though that's what consultants are occasionally asked to do. Blind gamers don't want a guided tour; they want the same thing every other gamer wants—the fun of exploring, the challenge of figuring things out, the joy of finally beating a level. But he'll take the jobs he's given, and had God of War had him on call, blind people wouldn't be left hanging. Mercifully, today, sighted people are here to help. Someone in the chat chimes in, and text-to-speech voice reads into Minor's ear: ' You're on a ledge, just jump down. ' Minor taps a button, and the game continues. He goes on to face off against a section boss, who launches into a series of frost wind attacks. 'It sounds like ice,' he says, marveling at the sound design. 'I can hear it sparkling and crunching when it whooshes past me.' He beats her in a few tries. Photograph: Darrell Jackson Photograph: Darrell Jackson Near the end of our time together, I ask Minor what his mother thinks about all of this. She's gotta be proud. Who else can honestly say their son is a trailblazer in a multibillion-dollar industry? 'We butt heads sometimes,' he says. This tracks with what almost every game developer I've ever interviewed has told me. Parents never understand. But I suppose Minor's case is a little different. 'Like, everyone wants this inspirational story about how we stuck it through and how we're closer because of it,' he says. 'But it's like—dude, what happened was traumatic. Like, we're damaged from what happened.' For years, Minor's mom told him his work was a waste of time. 'I spent all my time making my YouTube videos, all my time playing video games. And she's like, 'You need to get an education. You need to find a job.' She wasn't wrong.' Minor's mom is more understanding of his goals now, he says, as he has found some success. I ask Minor if he'd like to become more famous. Perhaps he could be a content creator and, on the side, still do consulting work for some big game companies. He interrupts me before I can even finish the question. 'I want a regular job, dude.' Working at a studio, Minor would be able to directly influence how gameplay is developed. Not making a 'patch,' but building an experience with both sighted and blind people in mind, from the ground up. And if the game was successful, other companies would imitate it. New industry standards. The game would have reach . Of course, if Minor could get a job at a major studio, he'd likely be its first fully blind employee. Probably the first in the industry, actually. But, again, he's not really interested in that. He'd rather just be another guy in the credits. I think he's struggling with the fact that I'm writing this very story, that the spotlight is, for the moment, entirely on him. 'The attention,' he starts, then pauses, looking for the right words. 'I don't want to say it's nice , but it is validating. That people care. It no longer feels like I'm screaming into the void.' Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@
