Sounds to me like his project has multiple actors that are the same character.
Like a timeskip happens, or something, and rather than simply changing actor a's stats and stuff to new things, he's making an entirely new actor to fill that role.
You can use the script $gameActors.actor(actorId).setName(n)
to set an actors name, in the same way that the event command can do it. Change actorId to the id number of the actor you want to change, and change n to whatever you want the actors name to be.
If you input the name of actor a, it can be found later by the following script: $gameActors.actor(actorId).name()
, so you could set other actors names to be the same by combining the two:
$gameActors.actor(2).setName($gameActors.actor(1).name())
That code will set actor 2's name to whatever actor 1 is, for example.