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Actors with the same name appear as one person #1796
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Reference: starred/jellyfin#1796
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Originally created by @Chrispynutt on GitHub (Jun 16, 2020).
Brian Cox is an Actor in RED, RED 2, etc https://www.themoviedb.org/person/1248-brian-cox
(Prof) Brian Cox is a presenter of The Planets, Wonder of .... series https://www.themoviedb.org/person/224290-brian-cox
Version 10.5.5 under docker on OMV 4
Using MovieDB as primary data source.
To recreate setup say RED in movies and The Planets in TV Series
I'd like to assign the ID as well as the generic name for actors.
@stale[bot] commented on GitHub (Oct 14, 2020):
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@cvium commented on GitHub (Nov 5, 2020):
I haven't confirmed the issue, but I'm pretty sure no one has fixed it.
@cvium commented on GitHub (Nov 6, 2020):
There is unfortunately no easy fix for this. Actors are poorly handled by various metadata providers such as OMDB, where they are presented with only a name and thus we have no unique id to tie actors to movies, shows etc. When two actors share the exact same name this becomes a problem. TMDB seems to have id's for the actors, so we might be able to do more than name comparison.
It's unlikely to be fixed before the database rewrite though.
@tomnehek commented on GitHub (Apr 26, 2022):
Just for awareness, this is still an issue.
@BugFixesAndPerformanceImprovements commented on GitHub (Aug 28, 2022):
Another example is Chris Evans. Pretty sure it's not Captain America in Top Gear.
@UnfinishedStuff commented on GitHub (Nov 27, 2022):
Just to add to this, an inability to discriminate between actors with the same name also leads to Cast & Crew photos being incorrect:
At least this could be solved if we could manually change Cast & Crew photos in the same way that we can for a series.
@cvium commented on GitHub (Nov 28, 2022):
Not really. The photo is tied to the Person entity, so it would fall apart if you had Wonders of Life and Succession in your library.
@UnviableFriend commented on GitHub (Jan 27, 2023):
Using TheMovieDB IDs rather than names would be a very nice change, if possible. And I don't know what data the API gives, but they do store the IDs for IMDB as well.
Names as identifiers cause additional issue as mentioned in my bug marked as a dupe #8906
@dmstek commented on GitHub (Apr 28, 2023):
Just wanted to tell that this is also a huge issue with non-english actors (russian, serbian, greek, you name it). Everyone transliterate any way they want. It would be very nice, if we could have a metadata editor, which can join such entities into one and you can select the name it will show. As if now you can try to rename actor to go by same name as the other duplicate, then this entity disappears completely from the movie :(
@peskyAdmin commented on GitHub (Sep 24, 2024):
Bump. This is still occurring in 10.9.11 in my case with
Matt Walsh(I)
and
Matt Walsh(XX)
just throwing a suggestion out there
If you were to look up the actors by navigating from the movie page. you would then be able to use the imdb id as a way to distinctly separate two actors.
@dl200010 commented on GitHub (Nov 17, 2024):
I can confirm this is happening still. I have the same actor as @peskyAdmin has and on the same version.
@jwrobertson86 commented on GitHub (Feb 16, 2025):
I can also confirm that this remains an issue. I apparently have three different David Mitchells associated with different productions: the British comedian, the Cloud Atlas writer, and a background actor who appeared in three Xena episodes in the 90s.
@Kingside commented on GitHub (Apr 27, 2025):
Confirming this is still an issue in the latest version, and adding another conflict to the list
I know it was mentioned much earlier, that the issue isn’t a particularly simple one to resolve, but I’m thinking in all the years since this has been open, maybe things are different now and worth another look?
I only mention that, because in this specific case, I know that between all the different meta data platforms I have hooked up that these two women have at least one or more unique IDs
However, when using the “identify” tool, despite those given fields already being filled in with different an unique IDs from whatever gets pulled down, it still can’t tell they’re different people and clobbers the other’s slugs with the rest of their information
I think it’s quite understandable that in the event when pulling down a person’s information all the slugs are identical or missing that that the previous person would end up being entirely wiped out, but while I haven’t looked at the source code governing this specific update yet, this point of conflict between opposing slugs definitely feels like it should be a likely opportunity for the code to know better, and finally implement some sort of safe guard
@zubfatal commented on GitHub (Jul 30, 2025):
Tom Holland (x) and Tom Holland (i) i was wondering why the bio said he was born in 1943 after looking at Uncharted (2022) and had also directed Child's Play
I agree that a better way would be to reference them by their ID from IMDB or TMBD, but I also know that this might not be "an easy fix" since it'll probably require quite a bit of restructuring, and also take multiple sources like IMDB, TMDB, TheTVDB etc. into account.
I am using Jellyfin v10.10.7
@LarsSimonsen commented on GitHub (Sep 29, 2025):
Another example, The legendary composer John Williams shares his name with an English actor who acted in multiple Hitchcock films and two episodes of Battlestar Galactica. In at least my instance of Jellyfin, the composer gets all the credit for the other guy's acting, which is kind of funny, because he doesn't get credited for any of his own music.
@jettycake commented on GitHub (Oct 5, 2025):
Surely this can be fixed by using IMDB or TVDB IDs for the actors? At least to differentiate between duplicate individuals.
It's crazy that the actor Brian Cox and the presenter Brian Cox cannot be distinguished as different people. Just looks sloppy for a start.
@Roardom commented on GitHub (Oct 5, 2025):
Just thinking out loud here, but if the actor's metadata provider id was saved, if one movie was scanned with one metadata provider, and if another movie was scanned using a separate metadata provider, there's nothing that would connect the actors fetched between the two metadata providers except by full name / date of birth or similar? So an actor that was fetched from tmdb would only list movies that were also fetched from tmdb, and there would be a duplicate actor entry for each metadata provider used.
@NeuroDawg commented on GitHub (Oct 20, 2025):
Still broken after database redesign and release of 10.11.0. And still confusing Will Smith, the American star of “I Am Legend” and “I, Robot” with the British white bloke who's the writer/producer of, and Emmy winner for, “Slow Horses”.
@cvium commented on GitHub (Oct 20, 2025):
Database has not been redesigned. The underlying framework was changed, but that has no bearing on the data models. No work has been done to fix this in 10.11.
@jwrobertson86 commented on GitHub (Nov 28, 2025):
I think the solution here is that, for any given actor, there's a unique local ID in a local database that then includes any IMDB/TMDB/whatever IDs plus all the other info/references thereto. If, like in your scenario, the same person winds up with two different IDs (e.g., one entry came from IMDB and the other from TMDB, and they never matched up), you can merge them like you merge two versions of a show and combine their info. Conversely, if we have two different actors marked as the same person (our recurring problem), then identifying them with one or more unique external DB entries (this would probably have to be done with three-dots, Identify on the show page rather than on the actor page) will create a new DB entry with a new local ID.
The problem fundamentally right now is that Jellyfin is using actor name as its key and that's a violation of Databases 101: your key must be unique.