‘South Park’ Creators Developed A Movie Starring Deepfaked Donald Trump
Video screenshot via Sassy Justice
Donald Trump, former US president and longtime entertainment star, was about to return to his celebrity roots again. A far cry from his position of leading a nation, though, he’d be under the mercy of South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker instead.
In October 2020, the pair released a 14-minute short, entitled Sassy Justice, with a flamboyant personality who looked exactly like the former POTUS. The resemblance is uncanny because the leading man was deepfaked with Trump’s face, pulling moves that would have been out of pocket for his doppelgänger. The video has garnered over 2.5 million views since.
It turns out that Sassy Justice was just a tiny preview of the ambitious project that the two had been working on, Stone and Parker told the Los Angeles Times in an interview. They admitted that they had been developing a full-length deepfaked film poking fun at the former head of state.
The movie was to be named Deep Fake: The Movie, and it was to be voiced by English actor Peter Serafinowicz, who was also the voice in Sassy Justice.
Deep Fake: The Movie, in fact, was the very reason Stone and Parker founded their deepfake production studio Deep Voodoo.
One day before production started, however, “the pandemic shut everything down,” Parker recounted. Everything they had been working on for months had to be scrapped, he continued. The duo eventually settled on producing the smaller-scale Sassy Justice.
As for the status of the film, Stone revealed that it is “sort of on hold.” They had dreamed up the plot with Trump’s presidency in mind, and now that it’s no longer as timely, they would have to rethink most of its details should they decide to bring it back.
Furthermore, they have also just spoiled the ending. Parker told the LA Times that the full-length comedy would lead to “Trump [being] just naked and getting run through the wringer and everything.”
That’s not to say that this could be the end of deepfaked Trump appearing on the silver screen in the same parodical light. The makers are just waiting for the story to regain timeliness. “He could be running again,” Stone noted.
In spite of the big setback that compromised Deep Voodoo’s first project, the studio has found other impressive ways to show off its deepfaking prowess. In May, it released the music video for Kendrick Lamar’s The Heart Part 5 with personifications of Will Smith, Kanye West, Kobe Bryant, and more, and that struck a chord with its audience to the sound of nearly 39 million views.
[via Variety, Los Angeles Times, IGN, video and cover image via Sassy Justice]
