South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker almost made a Donald Trump deepfake movie.
During an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the duo revealed that their first film after 2004’s Team America was almost a full-length deepfake mocking the former president.
“It’s sort of on hold,” said Parker. “It was very timely and the timeliness of it has passed. We’d have to majorly rethink it to do it now.”
The full-length Donald Trump deepfake would have starred Peter Serafinowicz voicing Trump, exactly as he did in Stone and Parker’s viral deepfake video, “Sassy Justice”.
The video was an unexpected hit, featuring then-president Trump reporting news out of Cheyenne, Wyoming under the name, Sassy Justice.
“It was going to be Deep Fake: The Movie,” explained Parker. “It was about this guy who looked exactly like Trump because we deep fake Trump’s face onto him. 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.”
“Even though the script was sort of timely, we ended up keeping the deep fake part of the studio going,” added Stone.
After the film fell through, Stone and Parker kept the project going on a smaller scale, creating the short video “Sassy Justice” that went viral during the pandemic. It was essentially the first content to come out of Deep Voodoo – Stone and Parker’s deepfake studio.
“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.’ I went to the office to start packing up my things because I was just kind of in shock.”
Unfortunately, it sounds as though the movie has been all but scrapped… sort of.
“I don’t know,” said Stone when asked if it could eventually see the light of day. “[Trump] could be running again.”
If Trump does run for office in 2024, expect the South Park duo to rethink the return of Sassy Justice.
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
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