The real Donald Trump has been conspicuously avoiding the media for the past several days, sparking conspiracy theories concerning his health/general aliveness. But the guy who pretended to be Trump for 60 nudity-filled seconds at the end of South Park’s season premiere, on the other hand, is more than willing to talk to the press.
As you may recall, the headline-making episode, “Sermon on the ‘Mount” ended with the town of South Park bending the knee to their flappy headed president by giving him free promos, seemingly in reference to Paramount’s apparent real-life corporate capitulation. The result was a PSA in which Trump strips naked in the desert, passes out and then gets a pep talk from his googly-eyed micropenis.
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While some assumed that the fake ad was A.I.-generated, behind-the-scenes photos posted online by South Park Studios revealed it was really a live-action actor with a deepfaked face (and Trey Parker’s finger playing the talking member) seemingly lifted from Parker and Matt Stone’s unproduced deepfake movie about a regular guy who happens to look exactly like Trump.
The actor playing the president wasn’t credited in the episode, but it turns out that he was Trump impersonator Dennis Alan. The 75-year-old Chicago native previously played Trump in a series of ads for an “upscale South Korean dental clinic.” As far as we can tell, they didn’t require any frontal nudity.
Alan recently spoke to Metro and confirmed that his scene was shot way back in early 2020, as part of Deep Fake: The Movie, before the COVID-19 pandemic forced the project to shut down. “Out of the blue I got an email from (Parker and Stone) saying they would like to use a minute of the footage in a South Park episode, four days before they were going to release the episode,” Alan explained. “I was so glad to hear from them, I said, ‘Sure, no problem,’ and the impact of it didn’t really register with me until after the episode.”
The Trump doppelganger doesn’t seem super-thrilled that he wasn’t credited for the episode, in retrospect. “I asked South Park about crediting me, and they said I should use the emails between us where I arranged for the re-use of the footage,” Alan claimed.
“Without those (behind-the scenes photos), people would still be arguing it was A.I.,” he continued. “This performance went viral worldwide, yet I’m invisible in the credits. It’s not the first time. My image has been used prominently before without credit. If it weren’t for my agent pushing my name out there, I’d still be a ghost in my own career.” And that agent, incidentally, is a “Kim Jong Un impersonator” named Howard X.
Alan did admit that getting credit is a “double-eged sword” since he’s “enjoyed by (both) Trump supporters and people who are anti-Trump.” But now he seems to really want the public to know that A) most of the scene didn’t require visual effects, and B) his genitalia isn’t really that embarrassingly small.
“Trust me, no algorithm can recreate this level of bad genetics,” he joked. “My face is already 90 percent there naturally, the South Park team only added about 10 percent digitally. The rest — the body, the acting, the comedic timing — was all me.” He went on to add, “I was actually all for going completely naked if the compensation reflected that artistic commitment. However, the production opted for a flesh-colored G-string, likely because, frankly, the ‘teeny tiny’ depiction they chose to animate wouldn’t have been ‘artistically accurate’ if it were truly me.”
Back in July, Alan’s agent fired off a press release in which the professional Trump similarly stressed that it “was unequivocally not my personal appendage on screen. Mine, I assure you, is considerably more substantial.”
Perhaps this obsession with penis size is a sign that Alan is using the Method technique?
