Trey Parker

Trey Parker (born 1969) is the co-creator of South Park — television’s longest-running scripted satire, which he has written, directed, and voiced with Matt Stone since 1997 — and co-writer of The Book of Mormon, one of the most successful Broadway musicals ever staged. Few working comedians have his range: Oscar-nominated songwriter, five-time Emmy winner, and the animating voice (literally) of an entire comedic universe.

Deep Voodoo: a deepfake studio born from a movie

In early 2020 Parker and Stone assembled a team of the world’s best deepfake artists for a feature film — “Deep Fake: The Movie,” a comedy about a Trump lookalike — and when COVID suspended the project, they kept the team and built a company instead. Deep Voodoo debuted publicly with “Sassy Justice” (October 2020), a surreal deepfake news-parody short that put a face-swapped Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, and Al Gore on YouTube weeks before the U.S. election, and in December 2022 raised $20 million from Connect Ventures, the CAA–NEA investment partnership.

The studio has since supplied deepfake visual effects for Kendrick Lamar’s “The Heart Part 5” video and Billy Joel’s de-aged “Turn the Lights Back On” video, and Parker put the technology at the center of South Park itself — the show’s 2025 season opener rendered a photoreal deepfaked Trump, and its 2023 episode “Deep Learning” carried the on-screen writing credit “by Trey Parker and ChatGPT.”

Parker frames deepfakes not as a threat but as a director’s dream: total shot-by-shot control over every performer. His joke that Sassy Justice was “probably the single most expensive YouTube video ever made” doubles as a serious point — Deep Voodoo’s pitch is making that quality affordable for every creator.