via BroBible / South Park
It’s not every day that a professional Kim Jong Un lookalike gets in touch, but that’s exactly how this story started. Howard X Lee, who has previously collaborated with Donald Trump lookalike Dennis Alan in a musical lounge act in Hong Kong, reached out to BroBible to connect us for an interview as Dennis’s media liaison.
The result was the wild, untold story behind South Park‘s viral Trump scene, at least according to an actor and former professional musician who tells BroBible he was engaged to play President Trump in a project filmed five years ago by Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
The Season 27 premiere sent the internet into a frenzy, and it delivered historic ratings, becoming South Park’s biggest premiere since the Clinton Administration with nearly 6 million viewers, and millions upon millions of streams and views online. The episode’s depiction of Donald Trump was so savage that it even provoked a statement from the White House, which dismissed the series as a “fourth-rate show” that “hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years.”
After the episode aired, many viewers assumed the shocking live-action sequence was created using AI. To set the record straight, the official South Park social media channels posted behind-the-scenes photos from the shoot. The post cheekily revealed that the scene was practically filmed, with co-creator Trey Parker himself stepping in to provide a stand-in for Trump’s “teeny-tiny” anatomy.
But as we learned from the man who played Trump in that scene, Dennis Alan, the official reaction is nothing compared to the wild, untold story of how the footage was actually made.
He tells BroBible that the clip was from a completely different, unreleased feature film shot five years ago on the literal eve of the pandemic.
When asked for the name of the film at the end of our discussion, Alan was direct: “Alma Junction.”
“It seems that footage that appeared in South Park was not produced for that episode,” Alan explained. “It was produced as part of a feature film that many years ago… I mean, you haven’t heard of it, because it never…”
The timing of the original shoot is almost unbelievable.
“The day that that footage was shot was the last day,” Alan said. “The crew was sent home the next day because COVID broke out… That was the day COVID broke out. Was that the day that that footage was shot.”
Watch the interview on YouTube:
For Alan, the demand for his act is a direct reflection of the political climate. During Trump’s first term in office, business was booming.
“During his first term, I was busy,” Alan said. “Actually, I’ve been to 15 different countries around the world, impersonating Trump… for a while there, during his first term, I was crossing the International Date Line twice a week with flying back and forth to Asia and all over. So it was an exciting, exciting time.”
The contrast with the following years was stark. When asked if demand dropped during the Biden presidency, Alan’s answer was blunt.
“Oh, absolutely. I was pretty much dark,” he admitted. “I can’t recall doing anything during that time.”
Being a lookalike for a political figure, he explained, is a far more volatile job than impersonating a typical celebrity. His work is directly impacted by geopolitical events. You can see some of these events on his Linktree and Dennis Alan – Trump lookalike & impersonator page.
“I had plane tickets for Istanbul, Turkey to do an advertisement of some kind,” Alan recalls to BroBible. “And that happened to be the day that this story about this one journalist got killed and hacked… yeah, in Istanbul. Well, job canceled, you know. If you’re a look alike of an actor, an actress or something like a that, it’s different than being a look alike for a political figure.”
Alan tells BroBible he’s been to 15 different countries impersonating Trump, including a memorable trip to Egypt to launch a new snack food.
“My job in Egypt, in Cairo, was to sell Twinkies,” he told us. “The recipe for Twinkies somehow… they sold the recipe for Twinkies to some enterprise, some interest in Egypt. Okay, fine, so they fly me first class to Cairo, Egypt. The idea was because Trump is known as the Orange Man… they had this new flavor of Twinkies that had an orange filling rather than this white cream. So I was going to introduce this orange flavor of Twinkie.”
But the job also comes with unintentional political confrontations. He recounted a tense situation in Finland where he was hired by a magazine for a street appearance during the summit between Trump and Vladimir Putin.
“I told the people beforehand that, look, I don’t do political rallies… We were going around, and these people in Helsinki said, ‘Well, we’re going to stop by this place where there’s this rally going on.’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to’… The rally was being held… by people who were anti-Trump people… I was walking around the edge of it, and some of these protesters saw me… I was surrounded by a group of protesters with signs and everything, asking me what I was going to do about the genocide of children in Syria.”
It all just goes to show that being a professional lookalike for a living is a wild and weird gig, where a forgotten film shoot can suddenly make you the most talked-about man in America, at least for a day.