The Hill's 50 Most Beautiful People

Age: 28
Hometown: Fier, Albania, and Charleston, S.C.
Political party: Democratic
Relationship status: Dating

It’s probably a good thing other members of Julian Malasi’s family didn’t follow him to Washington. Otherwise, he might have had some stiff competition on the 50 Most Beautiful People list — from his identical twin brother.

The multilingual 28-year-old policy issues manager for the American Chemistry Council, who moved from Albania to Charleston, S.C., as a teen, says having a spitting image of himself, in the form of his brother, Euclid, has sometimes gotten him into trouble.

As a Spanish and international-relations major at the University of South Carolina, Malasi remembers innocently waiting for an elevator one day when a young woman approached him. 

“She [said], ‘You act like you don’t know me.’ I was like, ‘Um, I don’t know you.’ ”

Things quickly got worse.

“She’s like, ‘You’re such a jerk!’ then leans over and slaps me,” Malasi recalls.

“I said, ‘I have an identical twin brother,' and she’s like, ‘Yeah, right.’ ”

When he’s not being mistaken for his twin by furious females, you can probably catch Malasi lacing up his sneakers for a run with his roommate’s dog, Rhett Butler, near his Logan Circle abode. “It’s an addiction,” he says. “If I don’t run at least two or three times a week, I feel like there’s something missing.”

Another thing he’s missing: a running partner. Despite being on the receiving end of some unfortunate cases of mistaken identity, Malasi says he wouldn’t mind his same-aged sibling making the move from the Palmetto State to the Federal City.

Although the twin brothers are competitive, Malasi admits that Euclid’s a better soccer player. He then quickly adds with a smile, “But I’m a better runner.”

— Judy Kurtz

---