‘South Park’s Deepfake Trump Was Recycled From An Unproduced Movie
There’s no new episode of South Park this week, but at least the show offered up some behind-the-scenes photos from last week’s season premiere, revealing that the climactic Trump PSA wasn’t A.I.-generated as it initially appeared to some viewers. No, it was merely a deepfake Trump face on a real actor’s body.
And, as we’ve mentioned already, it turns out that the president’s teeny tiny weiner was created using the most old school special effect imaginable: sticking googly eyes on Trey Parker’s index finger. Which is still, technically a digital effect.
While the Trump-skewering episode has dominated the zeitgeist over the past week, weirdly enough, the deepfake capper seemingly originated with a project that Parker and Matt Stone abandoned several years ago.
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During a 2022 interview with The Los Angeles Times, Parker and Stone revealed that the pandemic disrupted their imminent plans to make a new film. “Not a lot of people know that we were a day away from starting production on the first feature movie we had done since Team America: World Police,” Parker recalled. “We were going to start shooting on the day that the pandemic shut everything down. It was months and months of getting ready for that movie, to just being like, ‘Nope, it’s over.’”
What was the project? A deepfake movie starring Peter Serafinowicz that would have literally been called Deep Fake: The Movie. “It was about this guy who looked exactly like Trump because we deep fake Trump’s face onto him,” Parker explained. “And it was this whole funny thing because, of course, it ends up with Trump just naked and getting run through the wringer and everything, and that’s why it was so funny and so timely.”
That description should sound familiar to anyone who watched South Park’s season premiere (or read the first half of this article). But after the pandemic delayed production, Stone noted that the movie was “on hold,” while Parker suggested that the concept would have to be completely overhauled. “It was very timely and the timeliness of it has passed,” he told the Times. “We’d have to majorly rethink it to do it now.”
In the fall of 2020, the duo did release a series of “Sassy Justice” deepfake videos on YouTube, similarly featuring a Trump lookalike, played by Serafinowicz, named Fred Sassy. But the videos didn’t really adhere to any kind of narrative, nor did they end with the presidential doppelganger enduring a gauntlet of embarrassment, as the movie seemingly would have.
“Even though the script was sort of timely, we ended up keeping the deepfake part of the studio going,” Stone admitted, referring to their VFX company Deep Voodoo. And now, of course, the concept is timely again, thanks to the hellscape that is existence.
But instead of revisiting their film project now that Trump’s back in the oval office, Parker and Stone seemingly reworked their concept of humiliating a naked deepfaked Trump for South Park. And the world is better off for it.
