Olivia Rodrigo’s new music video for her “Expectations” remix with Chappell Roan is full of fun cameos, including David Byrne as a game-show host and producer Dan Nigro as a guy with a robot voice. But for fans of New York’s underground rock scene, there’s another surprise in store: Jake and Matt Derting, the identical siblings better known as the cool, scuzzy glam-punk/noise-pop duo Venus Twins, show up as part of Rodrigo’s team in a Family Feud-style contest about halfway through the video.
When we reach them over Zoom the day after the video’s premiere, both brothers are still buzzing with excitement, and they say their phones have been absolutely blowing up with notifications. “It’s really hard to reply to everybody, which is a good thing,” Matt says. “I want to reply to everybody, though. I want to be like, ‘Thank you!’”
Venus Twins, who have graced some of the city’s finest club stages as part of the live lineup of Fantasy of a Broken Heart in addition to releasing music on their own, first heard from a casting agent about a possible music-video gig about a month ago. “It was non-specific,” Jake says. “I think maybe it did say, ‘Grammy-winning artist,’ but they were hush-hush about it.”
“I think they were just looking for punks,” Matt says. “‘Interesting-looking people and punks,’ I think was the quote.”
“The casting person probably found us on Instagram and was like, ‘These twins are freaky,” Jake adds.
The two of them, who grew up in the Fort Worth, Texas, area before relocating to New York, have some prior on-screen experience, including a 2024 episode of MrBeast‘s YouTube show in which the online prankster convened 100 identical twins to fight for a cash prize. “We fought to the death and then came out the other end,” Jake says. So they were ready for anything.
A couple of weeks after that first casting call in September, they heard that they’d gotten the music-video gig. “We didn’t even know who it was until literally the night before,” Matt says. “And then we saw it was Olivia Rodrigo and we’re like, ‘Oh, sick.’ Then they said something about Chappell Roan. And we’re like, ‘Oh, whoa, it’s a collab!’”
The next morning, they reported to a “big warehouse studio” in Astoria, Queens. “We pulled up into the place and we just parked in an illegal spot and then walked in,” Jake says.
They spent about an hour in hair and makeup getting ready for their big moment. “They were just going crazy, pulling our fucking hair into liberty spikes,” Jake continues. “They literally took the whole hour to do Chappell’s makeup on us. And I would do that again.”
They were impressed by the scale of the shoot, which featured something like 100 people running around the set, compared to the “two plus maybe a friend”-style operation that Venus Twins are more used to.
With their punk-rock look complete, they chatted very briefly with the video’s stars. Both of them tried to play it cool with Rodrigo. “She was so sweet,” Matt says. “Really great energy.” Jake decided it wasn’t the right moment to tell her about Venus Twins’ music: “I’m trying to kick it with her. I wasn’t like, ‘Hey, you should check out our evil band.’”
Though they didn’t get to talk as much to Roan (“She was on the other side of the game show,” Jake notes. “She’s our rival”), they did have a nice chat with Byrne. “He introduced himself as David,” Matt says. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I know who you are.’ He was so cool.”
When the cameras started rolling, they tried to tap into the energy that director Bardia Zeinali and the rest of the crew wanted from them. “I was really trying to lock in and beat my chest,” Jake says. “We were the mean family.”
“Yeah,” Matt agrees. “They kept telling us to be crazy.”
Jake adds that he was trying to channel hardcore punk veteran Justin Pearson’s cult-famous Nineties appearance on The Jerry Springer Show. “You just take it and you run with it,” he says. “I’m going to be that nasty little stepbrother. We got to do it right.”
After about two hours of shooting their scene, they were done for the day. “They took off the makeup after the shoot, but we did keep the hair for a minute,” Jake says. “We were coming home feeling 10 feet tall, kind of on a high for a minute. Really fun… It was such an honor.”
On Oct. 31, Venus Twins will put on a different kind of costume when they perform a special Halloween set at the Brooklyn club Market Hotel as Philly emo band Modern Baseball. They recently released an album with a new project called iluvboyband that they formed with another set of identical twins, and they’re putting the finishing touches on a new Venus Twins album that they say is “more poppy and more electronic.”
“Maybe [Rodrigo] will like our boy band,” Matt muses aloud.
“Yeah, she’ll fuck with that one,” Jake says.
