August 22, 2026 • 50 mins
Has anyone ever told you you resemble a celebrity? Have you ever thought of making this resemblance your job? In today’s Classic episode, Ben, Noel and Casey explore real-life stories of body doubles, from World War II to surprisingly recent events.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow Ridiculous Historians, We're back with this week's classic episode,
(00:04):
Riddle me this, nol. What's more, what is the height
of fame? Because I think it's not just having a
mansion or a castle, or a jet or you know,
fish and Portuguese onions. I think it's when you make
enough money to have a doppelganger.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Ah, is that what you're shooting for? Ben, I don't
know you want a body dub.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I'm into body dubs right now. That's so Williamsburg. Oh
you like dubstep, I like body dubs.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
No, No, it is definitely a flex. As anyone never
told you that you resemble a celebrity. Well, perhaps you
may have a second career as a body double. It
would be quite the fascinating job, that's for sure. And
we have a story in today's episode of real life
examples of body doubles from World War Two to more
(00:59):
recent and quite surprising events.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Let's roll the tape. Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio.
(01:34):
Welcome to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thanks for tuning in.
If you are like most people on the planet, at
one point or another, someone has said, hey, you know
what you really look like insert person here x. It's
also it's also often said that everyone on the planet
statistically has a doppelganger.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
A doppel who's your doppel ben?
Speaker 1 (01:57):
I don't know, nol I get. I get a lot
of references, many of which are completely woosh moments to me.
But I think I just have to accept the fact
that a lot of people look like me. Really. Yeah, Well, you.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Get a lot of like looks of recognition that you
then have to process and realize, like, Okay, is this
real or is this someone imagining that I am someone
who they think I might be, but I'm actually not.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Yeah, it's a good question because like a lot of people,
for instance, when they say, hey, you look like this
other person, they're not. They're not looking at the entirety
of the face or the body, or the appearance or
the voice. They're looking at a specific maybe a facial
feature like a beard for instance. That happened to you, right?
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Man?
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Do you know how many people with beards I get
compared to? And the thing that's so weird is it's
their body type or any other quality completely irrelevant if
they have a bushy beard or some sort of well,
quaffed face mane you know like me, then we're the
same person. This is call it beard blindness. Have I
mentioned beardlin that's great like.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Face blindness, but beards that's great, man, that's it was
like a real thing, A brief anecdote for me, just
how tricky it can be. I had a long time
ago there was this store I used to go to,
this Asian grocery store called First Oriental. You know, it's
down the street from the Farmer's Market into cab and
(03:19):
I used to go there all the time to pick
up various things I would use when I was I
was cooking at home, and me and the lady was
like the proprietor got to know each other pretty well
sort of. And then one day she said, you know what,
you know who you look like? And I said, I
don't know who. I was very interested, and she said
Bradley Cooper, which is just fundamentally false. The only thing
(03:42):
me and that guy have in common is maybe one
or two mutual friends, and the fact that we both
have brown hair and maybe are genetically similar.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Well, you're both smolderingly good looking.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
That's so kind man, thank you.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
And just to have to back you up here. Ben's
not humble bragging there.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Bradley Cooper is in fact the closest best personal friend
of our boss Connel Burn.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
That's true. We can mention that on Let's come up Okay, yes,
yeah he is. He is with us defending the show
against the tyranny of Sheryl Crow.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Do you think Bradley Cooper has a body double?
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Ben?
Speaker 2 (04:17):
Just you know, for walking around times.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
I don't know. Definitely for do a shopping for him.
Definitely for characters and roles he plays. As an actor,
A lot of actors have body doubles for stunts or
for intimate romantic scenes, but.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
They don't have to look the same in the face.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
They mainly just have to be able to look the
same in profile, or like from behind or like from
a long shot.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Right Like when you see photographs of stunt doubles next
to their actors. It's it's kind of an uncanny Valley thing,
for sure, And occasionally it's a I'll say it, occasionally
it's a real life version of that. We have blanket
home meme.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
Right, you know what I'm talking about, Ben, It's I'll
send to you some Okay, I'll send youseth.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
For now we know that you are the real Nol Brown.
I am the real Ben Bolan. So far as we know,
there are no body doubles involved here.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
I refuse to stand up though, sir, right, And.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
We know that our super producer, Paul Mission controlled decand
is himself the one, the only, except no substitutions. But
today you and I are talking about real life body doubles,
not someone who just is a victim of beard blindness now,
(05:36):
not someone who vaguely looks like some other person with
brown hair.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Not the way Casey Pegram, super producer Casey Pegram has
a secret life in France as some sort of criminal
mastermind known as LaBouche.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Yes, that's an alternate identity right now.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
That's the same thing as a body double.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Right He's one guy with two identities that we know of.
A body double would be two seven real people who
share at least publicly a single identity.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
And specifically, today we're talking about political body doubles, which,
as it turns out, are pretty rare. Yes, it's a
pretty short listical episode, but all of them are nice
and beefy. A lot of good info out there, But
the ones that we do know of.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Yeah, we brought the juice and we wanted to be
sure that we didn't get lost in some quagmire speculation
real quick to set this up. You know why they're
increasingly rare, right, No, it's because of the rise of
photography and video. So you know, back in the thirteen hundreds,
someone could walk up with a letter and say, this
is a letter signed by someone else you've never met.
(06:38):
That's say, I am, you know, the Archduke of Hamington Sandwich,
which is maybe I'm paraphrasing.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
You must be.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Yeah, No, there's actually a story I heard through another
show that I'm working on in the music space. I
guess about how I think it was the Supremes, or
maybe it was the Commodores, a very influential, famous band
from that era, had a body double version of the
band that would tour simultaneously, so they could literally have
two versions of the show on the road at the
(07:09):
same time.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
That's crazy, dude. That reminds me of Morgan Freeman's voice double.
We talked about this before, I think, right, maybe not
on errow. Maybe we're just hanging out. So Morgan Freeman
has a voice double, and you know he's got such
an iconic, iconic resonance to his voice, a lot of
people want him to do a read for a commercial
(07:34):
or a cause or whatever. And apparently the story goes,
I'd love if someone can confirm this. The story goes
that he has two different kind of pricing structures. One
is if you can afford the actual Morgan Freeman, but
if you want the more economical choice. Word on the
street is he has like he officially co signs some
other guy to do Morgan Freeman voices. So it's crazy
(07:58):
can't get the real mf you can go for the
next best thing.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
I'm not trying to dog on voice actors because I
know it's definitely you know, it requires some skill, but
specifically what Morgan Freeman does, where he basically just is
Morgan Freeman all the time, that's kind of the height
of laziness. Like it's already an easy gig just to
be Morgan Freeman on Mike and read some ad copy
about credit card or something. But to have somebody else
(08:21):
kind of sub in for you and get the bargain
basement price. I don't know how I feel about that.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Morgan Freeman capitalism, baby roll the dice Yeah, it's interesting.
This is such a tangent, but there's also you know,
it leads us to one of those great divisions of actors.
A lot of a list amazing American actors are pretty
much themselves in films. Christopher Walken, al Pacino, I'll say it.
Keanu Reeves, who seems like a tremendous guy.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Sure does.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
So they have stunt doubles, but that's different. As you said, Nol,
getting to the point of our show, we do have
a point today, there are political body doubles. They are
much less common perhaps then fiction would have led us
to believe. So we'd like to go through a few
of these and get your take along the way. The
(09:10):
first one was a surprise to me. I was not
very familiar with this historical character. General Bernard Montgomery, known
as Monty to his friends, had a real life body
double named M. E. Clifton James. But why did he
have a body double? Right, he's a general. That's a
(09:31):
big deal, so maybe it's military related.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah, well it's true, so must call him Monty because
we're friends were familiar. Monty was a very influential general
who was responsible for a lot of the logistical planning
that went into the D Day invasion of Normandy, you know,
the big one. So they found it.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
They as an I five found it to be a
high priority to make sure that this guy was protected
in every sense of the word. Ah.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Yes, because this is deep in the propaganda front of
the war. Both the Allied and Axis forces are trying
to trick one another with the publication of fake plans.
They're trying to lay some red herrings and mislead their opponents. So,
as you said, Noel m I five, I five says,
(10:23):
this guy's a valuable asset. He's instrumental to D Day
and other events and will will need him alive and
at the top of his mental game. But he's just
one man. And that's when they run into a man
named M. E. Clifton James. Emmy Clifton James is not
a general.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
He's not even British.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
He is an Australian actor. Yes, And so I five
approaches him and they say, okay, we need you to
do us as solid. We have a special mission for you.
You are going to dress like General Montgomery, you are
going to act like General Montgomery, and you were going
to travel around northern Africa, right publicly talking about Allied
(11:08):
plans within the earshot of Nazi spies who don't think
we've discovered them yet. So act like this guy, act
like Montgomery and walk around saying total fake malarkey plans.
Just be like, you know how truly put in all
of our forces in Lithuania.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
This reminds me of the story we did about poujel Lia,
the operative for the British Intelligence Agency who planted fake
stories with the Germans.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Yes, yeah, just so very very similar tactic.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
We had somebody who write this very nice thing on
Instagram about that too recently.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Right, it's pretty cool these people post like cool history
pictures and little captions.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Yeah, that's a good idea. A shout out to History
with Astro Astro who said that they really enjoyed our
account of Agent Garbo, which was one of that guy's
many nicknames. And you and I both looked through this account.
I really enjoy the different snapshots that History with an
(12:09):
Astro takes, you know, little vignettes for sure.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Yes, there's a lot of those kind of accounts footing
around these days, and this one does a really good job.
So back to James, here's the thing. There was a
one little kink here. James had a missing finger, he
lost it during World War One, and he had a
prosthetic that would help him pass for Monty, you know,
and pull off the subterfuge.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
As long as he did have to type something right exactly.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
And James actually wrote an autobiography called I Was Montes's Double,
where he said that the Nazis were so completely taken
with his subterfuge, with his imitation, that they actually were
considering assassinating him.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Yeah. Yeah, So here's specifically what he was spreading, and
here's how successful he was. According to his own autobiography,
he had propagated the idea that the Allied troops would
be coming from southern France, So the German forces moved
a ton of their troops to southern France because that's
where they thought the evasion would be based rather than Normandy.
(13:14):
So this worked. It's kind of tough to say how
much of a sway his actions his secret mission had
on German forces, but they definitely did play a part. Now,
this con this duplicity was pretty complicated because the best
(13:35):
way to teleconvincing falsehood is to make it very, very
closely related to the truth. It has to have a versimilitude, right,
and this meant that James had to be a full
on method actor sometimes in ways he did not appreciate.
I five told him that he could not drink booze
and he could not smoke tobacco because Montgomery didn't do that.
(13:57):
So it could blow the whole thing wide open if
you catch General Montgomery out back in an alleyway, you know,
sneakily puffing on something. And additionally, the General did like breakfast,
but he did not eat eggs, and he did not
eat pork, and he had kind of a spartan diet,
so he wouldn't use milk or sugar as porridge. So
(14:19):
all of that is out for James. He has to
become this other person like Dennis Reynolds says and always
sunny in Philadelphia to live within his skin.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
Indeed, went full Leo on that business. So this whole
operation was referred to as Copperhead. And it was conceived
in January of nineteen forty four when Brigadier Dudley Clark
saw a movie that inspired him, a movie called Five
Graves to Cairo.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Right right, This actor Miles Mander Dudley Clark sees him
playing a British officer and he thinks, well, heck, that
guy looks a lot like General Montgomery. This is a
different guy from Emmy James. Here's how it goes down,
he says, Dudley that is, says this guy will be
a great body double, and so he develops this concept.
(15:10):
But then they meet a huge snag. They arrange a
meeting with Miles Mandarin in person, and then they say,
oh no, way too tall, way too tall. General Montgomery,
you see, is a bit bantam. He is five foot
six bantam.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
You say, what does that mean?
Speaker 1 (15:27):
Technically it means kind of a small chicken, but.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
It's also a weight class in boxing, U huh.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Bantam weight. It also uses is slangly used to refer
to people of diminutive stature with combative disposition.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
It's a vocabulary corner with then and all bantam. I
love that word. So, yeah, dude's a little short, he's
a little prince like.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Yeah sure yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Uh So they say, Okay, that's not going to work.
Everyone will clock that immediately if they meet him in person,
and a true body double has to be effective in person,
so they can't find any other actors, and they think
maybe this, maybe it's just not in the cards for
us to pull off this coup. Until that is a
(16:12):
guy named Stephen Watts, who's an mi I five officer.
Happens across a photo of a British Army lieutenant named
Emmy Clifton James who is dressed as the General for
a stage show.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
Weird, weird, so many weird little happenstancey things that happen here.
And this guy was sort of a lesser known Australian actor,
sort of a Toast of London type character. He was
forty six, so he was you know, it wasn't happening
for him, but he had been in this production and
they He then was assigned to the Royal Army pay
(16:44):
Corps and was based in Leicester, not Leicester like you
think it would be pronounced when you look at it
on paper.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
It's a tricky one. It's a really but it's like
Worcester in Massachusetts.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
But it's almost like, I think I'm still gonna get
yelled at even though because I said it wrong. Even
though I said it right, I said that I wanted
to say wrong. And that's just as bad as saying
it wrong. Nah man lean into it all right. It's
a living language. So Leicester is Ray's base working for
the Army, Royal Army pay Corps. And he kind of
did little side gigs as as an actor on the
(17:13):
you know, when he wasn't when he had free time.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
M h that Watts and Clark made this happen.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Yeah, yeah, that's right. Stephen Watts and Dudley Clark put
this operation Copperhead into motion and it worked. As we said.
Emmy James had to go full Daniel day Lewis and
assume the role of Montgomery. It wasn't super pleasant for him,
but by gosh, by golly, by gummy, he did it
and pulled it off successfully. This was This was admitted
(17:47):
by General Montgomery himself. On May eighth, nineteen sixty three.
Emmy Clifton James died. He was sixty five years old.
When the General received word, he said, he performed a
very useful had a very dark time of the wool.
What he did completely fooled the Germans.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Is that your Churchill voice?
Speaker 1 (18:06):
It's no, no, No, Churchill voice is way more RiPP roar.
Is it offensive?
Speaker 3 (18:09):
That's just sort of your General British official voice, and
you'll notice this guy's voice changed.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
He's got two different voices here. Yeah, so the General
totally co signs this. But we have to ask ourselves.
Did he completely fool the Germans? It would seem so
for his part. Yeah, But this was one of several
other operations going on.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Because again our guy Poujol was heavy, heavily involved in
this kind of campaign of deception as well. There was
another operation, but they were happening in tandem because both
revolved around D Day and the planning of D Day
and making sure the Germans did not know where it
was going to happen, absolutely where they were going to
invade on the beach.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
So on a one to ten success scale for this
body double the Stoppelganger, I gotta say man a ten,
especially considering that he had to wear a fake finger
and he still pulled it off. How did that work out?
Where they just like the General doesn't shake.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Hands exactly, all right, that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Howie Mandel doesn't shake hands.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
He's a notorious germophobe, right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Yeah, he's a fist bumper all day. So this is
one of those rare cases of a proven, documented, successful
body double, but it's not the only one. We'll stay
roughly within the same time period, give or take a
few decades, and let's travel across the Iron Curtain. No,
(19:44):
why are we going to Russia for the next story.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Why wouldn't we? We've both been watching Chernobyl. I mean,
it seems like an obvious place to go, seems like.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
A great place. It's a it's a learning opportunity, it
really is.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
No another famous body double, or one that we know of,
at least was one belonging to I guess you could
say Joseph Stalin.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Yeah, yeah, Joseph Stalin, one time leader of the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics or USSR, and by.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
All accounts a real pill, a real pill and nearing
the end of his life, especially very paranoid. I mean,
it seems like Soviet culture sort of engenders that overall,
like with the KGB and everyone feeling like they're followed
and tapping phones and what do they say, confirm.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Or trust but verify.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
Yes, that's sort of the doctrine of the KGB or
of like Russian intelligence in general. So it basically means
trust no one.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
So there's so many strange facts about this guy. First off,
we still have people arguing about when his actual birthday is.
He was born in Joseph Visyyanovich Jugashvili and I am
woefully mispronouncing that. And then when he was thanks Tilt
for that slow clap. And then when he was in
(21:02):
his thirties he changed his name to Stalin because it
means man of steel.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Got a nice ring to it.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
The balls on this guy, seriously, brass now steel, the
steal off the steel on this guy.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
So during his time during the Second World War, he
of course became concerned that someone would attempt to assassinate
him and the predecessors of the KGB, the Soviet secret
police started recruiting people to be decoys more or less
for Stalin. So he had like a team of doubles. Yeah,
he had a gang. Mm hmm, he really had a Doppelgang.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
That's good, Ben, that's all right. Seven out of ten.
I liked it, thank you. I would have given it
an eight point five thank you. That's very kind.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
So yeah, we looked into this, and the thing is
that he was given these political decoys in World War Two.
But it is widely suspected that he kept them employed
for the rest of his life.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Right, there's also some conjecture that he faked his own
death and that it was one of these decoys in
his coffin, which which that would imply that he had
to have them killed in his place. I don't pretty
cold blooded. I don't think that would be a problem
for him. No, I don't think so either. I think
it would just be another Tuesday self sacrifice. But I'm
(22:18):
telling you, I'm so steeped in Chernobyl right now. To
serve what is it to serve the USSRU?
Speaker 1 (22:24):
What was the what was there? Was that film that
came out maybe a year ago or so.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
The Death of Stalin? That's it's fantastic, it's great. Jeff
is in it.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
And wait does he play He doesn't play Stalin, Steve
as Shemi plays Krushev and the whole kind of you know,
gimmick of the movie. It's not a gimmicky movie at all.
This this totally isn't an issue. Everyone just has their
own accent. No one uses Russian accent. Steve Bismi as
Khrushchev sounds just like Steve Bushemy as Steve Bushmi.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
It's fantastic. Yes, I recommend it so highly.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
It's it's the guy, uh, what's his name, Ianucci, who
is the creator of Weep and another political series.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
It's British political series.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
But it's just really sharp, really funny and really disturbing,
and it really shows.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
This whole culture of paranoia. I don't remember if the
Doubles played into it or not.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
I don't remember either. I need to rewatch it. But
it totally nails that Gallows humor or the paranoia, and
it is based on fact. We could do an entire
episode about the weird death of Stalin now that it's
in question. So during his rise to power, he implemented
numerous murder plots against people are citizens of the Soviet Union.
(23:39):
Anyone who opposed him would go to a fake trial
and be executed or kangaroo court right or they would
just disappear. And he kind of functioned under a sort
of unfortunate self fulfilling prophecy. He was a man convinced
that he was surrounded by enemies, and his behavior create
(24:00):
a roster of people who very much wanted him dead
or knew that their lives would be easier if he
was out of the picture. We know for sure that
he had at least two body doubles that he called
political decoys, but there may have been there may have
been many more. One one is named Rashid. That's even
(24:23):
now in twenty nineteen. That's all we know about the
guy is like his first name.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
We also know of a man named Felix Dadyev, who
is another of one of his body doubles who we
are aware of. And here's the thing.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
It's tough to prove that any political leader used a.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
Body dumble it is. It is because they would not
want that information out there. This is not something they
would want to broadcast. It's also kind of it's not
embarrassing exactly, but it certainly tips your hand. If if
it's like a known thing, it removes all effectiveness, absolutely
all efficacy of the Yet so we did.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
We don't find out about Rashid and Felix for a
long long time. Rashid actually dies in nineteen ninety one
at age ninety three, so the double outlived the original.
But because we know more about Felix da Diev, maybe
we can explore his story a little similar to Emmy
James at least in my opinion, he was like an
(25:24):
actor trying to make it happen. Right.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
Oh, get this though, dude, Felix Dadev didn't even it
didn't come out officially that he had been one of
I believe the very least four of Stalin's doubles that
we know until April until two thousand and eight, So
I mean, this is pretty new information.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Uh. And I believe.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
Daddeev got permission, special permission from Putin himself to be
able to come out with this information for his own purposes,
so we could like write a book about it. Yeah,
and he was eighty eight, so that we know about
Russia though, wouldn't you think I would have thought that
Putin would have said.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Sir, it was a different times, it was a different time.
And also that kind of that kind of information when
it comes out is useful for them. It becomes a
situation where you want people to know. It makes someone
clever full you exactly. So Dadyev during the time that
(26:21):
the Second World War breaks out is an actor, an illusionist,
and a magician.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Pretty cool, Pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
So he was all set to travel to the UK
as a member of the state, singing and dance band
of Ukraine. But when the war broke out, he got
reassigned to a concert brigade. So entertaining the troops certainly
what we.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
Have in the States with the USO, where you know,
to entertain the troops, keep moral up and all of
that exactly.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
However, in the Soviet military, if you're a soldier, you're
a soldier. You're a soldier, meaning that he still had
to fight while juggling and doing magic illusions.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Yeah, seriously. Yeah, and Dancy, he had it harder than
any of them.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
He was a triple threat that was pressed into quadruple
threat status. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
And this, this, you know, eventually led to him being
quite badly injured.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
In nineteen forty two.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Right during the Russian liberation of Grosny. His family is
notified that he has died. But here's what actually happened.
In nineteen forty three, He's flown to a small cottage
near Moscow and the Secret police tell him that he
needs to forge a new identity as Stalin's body double.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
So they're capitalizing on the fact that he's been reported
as dead.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Correct, Yeah, yeah, I mean it's great, he's a ghost
at this point.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
M so no one's going to look for a ghost.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Exactly exactly, So he starts training to become the spitting
image of Stalin, both in appearance and behavior. The problem
is that this guy at this point is is in
his what his mid twenties or something. Yeah, and Stalin
is sixty years old.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Look at the very least.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
So they really have to implement some serious like you know,
prosthetics and movie magic kind of stuff to really age
this guy.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
And so he watches repeated, repeated samples of Stalin's public speeches,
of his ambulatory habits. How he's walking is.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
The way you hear method actors work. You know, we're
like training to be portray someone in a film.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
You go through.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
Every possible archival, you know, foot piece of footage that
you can, and you learn their mannerisms. You learn the
way they move and the way that their facial expressions are,
any ticks that they have, you know, and he kind
of tells, really really interesting.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
This is so wild. Okay. So his his first gig
is pretty intimidating. He is tasked to stand in for
Yosef Stalin at the Kremlin, and the idea was that
if he can convince ministers and committee leaders that he
is actually Stalin, then he can officially be employed as
(29:02):
a political decoy. And it worked. It worked so well
that they sent him to talk to other international leaders, right,
that's true.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
He went to Yalta to meet with Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
This is so cool that we have so much information
about everything that he actually did, straight from his mouth
and with the approval of the state no less. Yeah,
he met with Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to discuss the
reorganization of Europe after the war. And here's the thing.
He had a sort of a cross purpose here. He
was meant to be a decoy that allowed the real
(29:37):
Stalin to land in Yalta and not be noticed. So
he was sort of like a decoy in a separate plane.
It made his exit, and then the real Stalin was,
you know, landed elsewhere.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
Yeah, exactly. So he said that he had had he
not impressed the chief of the Secret police or Stalin's
personal head of security details, he probably would have been shot.
He believes that because they couldn't let the political decoy
story be in the news at all. Even so, if
the guy was an unsuccessful audition, right, then they can't
(30:12):
have him walking around looking like Stalin, knowing all these
intimate details. Because he was successful, he was forced to
sign an NDA, or non disclosure agreement that prevented him
from saying anything about his role as Stalin's body double
for decades after Stalin's death in nineteen fifty three. He
(30:35):
was also never able to tell his family that he
was alive. He could never tell them what he was
doing for the Soviet government. And this was so ironclad
that when Stalin died and they never and they needed
no more body doubles, he had to create an entirely
different identity for himself. And that's how we came to
(30:56):
know the musician Tom Waits.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
Exactly funny thing too, Bene. When I think of a double, like,
I think of them as like buddies, like hanging out
and stuff. You know, I don't know why, And that's
where my that's where my mind goes. Yeah, not the case,
my friends, not the case. Felix only met Stalin one
time in his entire life, and near the end of
Stalin's life in nineteen fifty three. And there's a fantastic
(31:22):
article on history collection dot co that goes through a
lot of this chronology called The Strange Life of Joseph
Stalin's Body Double by Donna Patricia Ward, and she quotes
this from this from this meeting, saying that Stalin quote again,
this is from the autobiography quote.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Smiled and gave me an approving nod, and that was it.
I told you what I saw you, hey, man validated.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
You don't want to talk to that guy?
Speaker 2 (31:47):
No, probably not.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
People will die, absolutely And can you imagine how I mean,
you could almost have a heart attack from being in
the same room with that guy and just making an
eye contact. Seriously, if he smiles and nods, that's it.
That's you got what you came for. You're a ghost.
Now disappear. Don't let him see you again. He might
change his mind. So now we've upped the stakes because
(32:12):
now we have a guy who has multiple body doubles.
We have one more example for today, which is much
more recent and even even goes a little past our
usual caveat. We usually try to keep things, you know
in the three Yeah, yeah, because of the gorilla. Yeah,
(32:34):
so we that is true. Check out our episode where
we pretty much spontaneously decided.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
That yeah, I still feel good about it. I am
totally fine with this is the right call on our part.
Uh So, now we're journeying to the Middle East Rock specifically,
this is the story of Saddam Hussein. Like Yoso Stalin,
Saddam Hussein apparently used more than one body double for
(33:00):
the war. Many people in Iraq said they could tell
the real Saddam from one of his multiple lookalikes, not
by watching him but are the person pretending to be him,
but by watching his bodyguards, which were around him at
all times. Yeah, and Saddam was reported to have had
(33:23):
a veritable menagerie, a harem. I don't know what do
you call a group of employees. None of those words apply.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Doppelgang is still.
Speaker 3 (33:32):
Found, the total doppel gang. Yeah, he really did. He
had multi multiples while he ruled Iraq. And this is
according to US intelligence. So you had mentioned earlier, Ben
that there was some there were some tells that the
bodyguards would have that would kind of let folks know
who knew what to look for, whether they were dealing
(33:53):
with the real artic of the real deal, or you know, one.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Of these one of these copycats.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Yeah, So if the bodyguard appeared a little too casual,
or if they appeared to laugh at jokes or something.
A lot of Araki's took that as a tip off
that they were not guarding the real Saddam, because they
just they wouldn't be that chill and relax if it
was the genuine article.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Another tell from the Washington Times.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
Washington Times reports an article called the fate of Saddam's
Lookalikes remained unknown was the fact that Saddam himself was
a big fan of close ups.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Very very vain guy.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. This is This is
the same guy, by the way, who was a fairly
prolific author of romance novels.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Erotic fiction. Dare we say, yeah, which like sex mysteries.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
Yes, that's it. That's one of that's one of our
new favorite idioms or expressions. We gotta, we gotta bring
that into the fold on air. But yes, he loved
to close up. He was a bit of a ham.
The problem is that when you have a look alike,
you need to keep a distance totally.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
Eric shadows the illusion because again, this is one that's
much more in the era of constant around the clock,
twenty four hour news cycle, you know.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
Right, because now we're in the digital age, and streaming
video can be transported across the planet very easily, so
there are more opportunities to determine whether someone is a
body double. People were so concerned about this, and I
love that you mentioned US intelligence earlier in People were
so concerned about this that when Saddam Hussein was captured
(35:39):
in two thousand and three, then Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld said, Okay, we need to figure out if we
have the real guy, you know what I mean, or
if we just have some hapless person who is forced
to be Saddam Hussein.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Well, surely every ready's don't we know about these doubles?
They wouldn't have been so hapless, right, It would have
been almost a privilege for me.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
It seems to be like Felix Dadiev strikes me as
someone who made a patriotic decision, So did Emmy James,
so we can only imagine it would be it would
be similar, right. So Rumsfeld was so concerned about this
that he demanded they do DNA testing because you know,
(36:20):
some of these body doubles have probably spent decades at
this point mirroring the real deal totally.
Speaker 3 (36:26):
And I do want to back down my previous statement,
a lot of these folks were in fact forced to
do this.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
There's a film called The Devil's.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Double that came out in twenty eleven that kind of
looks at the Saddam Hussein regime through the eyes of
a double that was meant for his son, Ude, who
was a real piece of work himself in his own right.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Yeah, big time, and this man was forced to do this.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Yeah, yeah, I think I've seen that film. So Rumsfeld,
you know, he's so paranoid about this that he demands
they collect DNA and he accepted it finally as ninety
nine point something percent proof positive that this was the
genuine Saddam Hussein. And he also emphasized, he said, look,
(37:12):
when we caught him, Saddam Hussein admitted his identity and
several of his former cabinet members confirmed he wasn't a
body double. But his body doubles were so dedicated to
this job that they had undergone plastic surgery, and they
could have even had things like tattoos, bullet holes, or
(37:35):
moles that would make them appear to look even more
like the leader. And as I think it's really interesting
that you mentioned Ude Hussein that's his oldest son, right,
so his body double the guy in real life named
Latif Yahia. Y Ahia your school chums, I believe. Yeah,
(37:57):
they went to school, right, And then he, like all
Iraqi citizens at the time, had mandatory military service. It's
part of growing up. So in nineteen eighty eight he
is enlisted non consensually to be UDA's body double. And
then he said it was pretty He said Oude was
a psychopath. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
There's even a story where from a former Iraqi soccer
player by the name of Shahar Haydar who said that
during a match with Jordan, the team lost and he
personally was dragged across the ground with two other players
and then they were forced to take their shirts off,
and they tied their feet together and pulled their knees
(38:39):
over a bar while they were on their back, and
then they dragged them across the concrete, peeling the skin
off of their backs. And then they would force them
to get in a sand pit so there would be
sand in the wounds on the really really really psychotic,
grizzly stuff. They even made them climb a ladder and
jump into a vat of raw sewage with these open wounds,
and it was the idea that like they would, they
(39:00):
would do that to them until they won. Seems like
really good motivation there.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
Let's talk a little bit about Uday Hussein. Writing for
The Guardian, Suzanne Goldenberg looks into this guy's behavior in
life and he's incredibly dangerous and imbalanced. He was a
sadist with a taste for cruelty so extreme that his
father had to say, this kid is not a worthy air.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
He's a real Jeoffrey Lanister type figure.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Totally yeah, one hundred percent on that. So when he
was overseeing these soccer teams, he apparently kept a private
torture scorecard where he would write instructions on how many
times someone should be beaten according to how they performed
in a losing game. He was a notorious sexual predator.
(39:52):
He would order any girl or woman who caught his
eye to be brought to his private pleasure doom. So
this was this was a place with It was on
his father's estate, with indoor fountains, big erotic murals, HIV
testing facilities, and huge stashes of drugs. He had another
just straight up torture chamber secreted somewhere away on the
(40:15):
banks of the Tigris. He shot one of his uncles
in the leg. In nineteen eighty eight, he bludgeoned his
father's bodyguard to death in front of people at a party,
and yeah, it was just worse and worse and worse.
So I would hate to be his body double. Oh absolutely,
I almost would rather. I don't know, it's tough to say.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
I kind of want to see the film. I have
not seen it. I've just read a little bit about it,
so I understand that.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
It's pretty visceral and a lot of the stuff is
dealt with, and this person is basically like living in
fear of his own life. Not to ment to the
fact that he is being a body double for a
man who is universally despised.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Yeah, probably people gunning for him all the time.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
Great point to people know that he's not the real
ude because he's not killing people parties. That's a very
dubious distinction. Yeah. So eventually Oude passes away in July
of two thousand and three. He had already at this
point been imprisoned several times, been exiled several times, and
even received a kind of sort of death sentence from
(41:18):
his father's government. So our thoughts go out to anybody,
especially to Latif who anybody who had to be a
body double for someone that violent and destructive. And these
are so these are just three examples of real life
proven body doubles. I guess we could say four examples,
(41:40):
because you know, we're two Hussein's deep at this point.
But there are many, many more alleged body doubles.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Right. A guy named Joe R.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
Reader, who served as undersecretary for the US Army, gave
an interview with Fox News in one where he kind
of intimated that there were some others that he knew of.
He said, Osama bin Laden likely have, which makes a
lot of sense, being that he was so doggedly being
hunted by the US military.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
Uh, and also Manuel Noriega. What are some other ones been?
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Well, of course there's Fidel Castro. I don't know if
I was body double level, but I did a pretty
good Castro costume one Halloween really in yester years. Yes, yeah,
I have the jacket for it in the hat. It's
mainly what it is.
Speaker 3 (42:30):
He's need a really nice square beard, yeah, and a cigar,
and I could grow I could grow beards pretty quickly.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
Nice offensively superpower.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Dude, it's a very inconvenient superpower because I'm a guy
who likes to drink milkshakes and eat soup and I
just can't. Okay, I have a min's respect for you, man.
You have a great beard. I don't know if you
guys know this about my co host here, but he
has a he has a fantastic and well quoifed beard.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
No, I know because of beard blindness from the top
of the show, remember, yeah, but we need to we
need to thanks for big up in my bear. Here's
some other ones that aren't body doubles. Winston Churchill was
reported and you could have been this guy Ben. Honestly
sure he could do such a good, such a good impersonation. Yeah,
used a voice impersonator, a man named Norman Shelley to
(43:15):
do these like again, it's sort of like what we're
talking about with Morgan Freeman, just kind of like laziness
like he did. He didn't want to do those morning
breakfast chats every day, so he had someone else.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
He was probably tanked, right, yeah, hungover exactly.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
That makes perfect sense then, an aid to Henry Kissinger
has been on record saying that when Kissinger went to
China on a secret mission to China and seventy one
he used an impersonator at least one time.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
So is this okay? Here's my question is we had
earlier talked about what a what a rich person's toy
a blimp must be, Like you own a blimp? Yeah,
then your blimp riche You're you're blimpriche. You're frivolously possibly
offensively wealthy.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Blimpridge is a funny thing to say. It sounds like
it's own word.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
It sounds somehow like a curse work. It does, But
I love it. So I'm thinking that having your own
body double is another one of those rarefied luxuries of
billionaires in the elite, you know what I mean totally.
I'm supposed to take the blimp out to the Builderberg conference,
but I believe I'll send my body double.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
Here's the thing, though, it only matters if it has
to be you, right, Otherwise it's just called a servant,
that's true, or like an assistant or something like that. Right,
someone is to go do errands, be a runner for you.
So you have to not only be wealthy, you have
to kind of be pretty damn important and need to
have a lot of FaceTime that either you don't feel
like doing or that could actually put you in danger.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
And there have been many other body doubles or alleged
body doubles throughout history. There was even a Mexican politician,
Renato Trunco Gomez, who held a national competition in twenty
fifteen to try to find the best candidates to be
as body doubles, which might defeat the purpose. And I
(45:05):
think in China this may still be going on. Wealthy
people who are sentenced to serve time in prison or jail,
they can engage in the practice of hiring what's called
a replacement convict. So you get sentenced, you get a
guilty plea, but then you just pay someone else to
(45:26):
go to jail for you must be nice. I don't
want anyone to go to jail, right.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
I hope you're a good person, Ben, You've got a
kind heart.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
That's very that's a that's very kind of you. Just say,
and this is our episode. Look now I have to
ask you, know you don't have to, I feel compelled
to ask, do you do you have any body double
observations or doppelganger observations?
Speaker 2 (45:51):
With which you agreed.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
Did someone ever say something like, hey, you know you
you kind of look like or sound like, doesn't have
to be faced. You also maybe sound like this person
you agreed and said. It wasn't just the beer.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
You know, it comes up a lot.
Speaker 3 (46:04):
It's really weird. I've heard this multiple times from listeners
writing in. They say that I sound like Dwight from
the Office.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
I've heard this.
Speaker 3 (46:11):
I don't hear it. I don't get it, and I
love the Office and I like Dwight, but I don't
know what it is. And I've only really seen the
British version of the Office.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
Oh, the American version is great, That's what I hear.
I hear great things.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
So maybe maybe I can make a call on that
when I'm more familiar with it. But yeah, we have
received several emails regarding that.
Speaker 3 (46:28):
My god, now that's not so I'm doing. I'm doing
job from Arrested Development. Oh yeah, I don't even know
who still reminds me very I'm going to say it.
I know it's not his favorite thing. Maybe aware we're
all kind of a big family here. How stuff works.
One of our producers, brilliant guy, friend of the show
and personal friend of mine named Chandler Mays always freaks
(46:51):
me out by how much he resembles the actor who
plays Job in Arrested Development.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
He does a little bit.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
I can that saw so much in the face. It's
the swag, it's the mannerism. Yeah, yeah, it's the love
of illusions. Very true.
Speaker 2 (47:03):
It's a very big, big, big sweeping hand movements. I
agree with that. Well, this has been an episode, and
I think it was a pretty good one.
Speaker 3 (47:11):
I don't know if I do say so myself. Yes, yeah,
I want to get too big here, and I want
to know get too big league.
Speaker 1 (47:17):
No. Yeah. When I have a meeting with the other
Ben Bolan later this weekend, and I think he'll be
he'll be really glad to know that this went well.
In the meantime, we'd like to hear from you. Do
you ever get a let's all be nice to each
other on the internet? Do you ever get repeated comparisons
(47:38):
either in your voice, your mannerisms, or your appearance, and
if so, do you agree with that? Do you have
like do you have like thirty eight people a day
tell you that you look like Natalie Portman? You know,
I had a long time so I had a very
difficult time differentiating for years Natalie Portman and Paul What's
her cure? And Knightley.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
Yeah, I could see that it looks similar.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Yeah, well that's on me. Maybe I have face blind.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
Do you remember the show The Adventures of Pete and Pete.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
I'm familiar with it.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
And huge fan.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
There's a character on it called Endless Mike who's kind
of a bully, and for the longest time I thought
that was young Sam.
Speaker 1 (48:14):
Rockwell, I remember you mentioned this earlier, and then.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Some friends of some of friends of ours who are
also big fans of the show thought the same thing.
Speaker 1 (48:22):
Well, maybe you're onto something. Let us know. Let us
know your favorite doppelganger look alike or body double stories.
You can find us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. For Facebook,
we highly recommend checking out our favorite part of the show,
your fellow listeners on our page or Ridiculous Historians.
Speaker 3 (48:38):
Yeah, and if you want to find me individually on Instagram,
you can look me up at how Now Noel Brown And.
Speaker 1 (48:45):
If you want to find me on Instagram, I believe.
Most recently I was looking into the problematic past of
Belgian comic strips at the Belgian Comic Strip Museum. That
instagram is at ben Bowling.
Speaker 2 (48:58):
If you don't want to do any of that stuff,
you can us an email. We do have one. It
is ridiculous at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (49:04):
And of course, as always, thanks to our superproducer Paul
I'm standing in for super producer Casey Pegram like a champ.
Thanks to Alex Williams who composed our theme. Thanks to
Gabe Lucier who helped us put this episode together research wise.
Speaker 1 (49:17):
Yeah, thanks to Christopher Hasiotis. Because we just liked we
just like to thank him in general.
Speaker 3 (49:22):
Jonathan Strickland, the Quizzer can go right to help. Thanks
to Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1 (49:27):
To aka the Quizzor, thanks so much to you for listening,
and Noel, thank you for being you. You know, if
you are a body double right now, I will say
that you are doing a top notch job. I do.
Speaker 2 (49:38):
I take my work very seriously. See you, letter folks.
Speaker 3 (50:02):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Fellow Ridiculous Historians, We're back with this week's classic episode,
(00:04):
Riddle me this, nol. What's more, what is the height
of fame? Because I think it's not just having a
mansion or a castle, or a jet or you know,
fish and Portuguese onions. I think it's when you make
enough money to have a doppelganger.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Ah, is that what you're shooting for? Ben, I don't
know you want a body dub.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I'm into body dubs right now. That's so Williamsburg. Oh
you like dubstep, I like body dubs.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
No, No, it is definitely a flex. As anyone never
told you that you resemble a celebrity. Well, perhaps you
may have a second career as a body double. It
would be quite the fascinating job, that's for sure. And
we have a story in today's episode of real life
examples of body doubles from World War Two to more
(00:59):
recent and quite surprising events.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Let's roll the tape. Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio.
(01:34):
Welcome to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thanks for tuning in.
If you are like most people on the planet, at
one point or another, someone has said, hey, you know
what you really look like insert person here x. It's
also it's also often said that everyone on the planet
statistically has a doppelganger.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
A doppel who's your doppel ben?
Speaker 1 (01:57):
I don't know, nol I get. I get a lot
of references, many of which are completely woosh moments to me.
But I think I just have to accept the fact
that a lot of people look like me. Really. Yeah, Well, you.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Get a lot of like looks of recognition that you
then have to process and realize, like, Okay, is this
real or is this someone imagining that I am someone
who they think I might be, but I'm actually not.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Yeah, it's a good question because like a lot of people,
for instance, when they say, hey, you look like this
other person, they're not. They're not looking at the entirety
of the face or the body, or the appearance or
the voice. They're looking at a specific maybe a facial
feature like a beard for instance. That happened to you, right?
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (02:38):
Man?
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Do you know how many people with beards I get
compared to? And the thing that's so weird is it's
their body type or any other quality completely irrelevant if
they have a bushy beard or some sort of well,
quaffed face mane you know like me, then we're the
same person. This is call it beard blindness. Have I
mentioned beardlin that's great like.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Face blindness, but beards that's great, man, that's it was
like a real thing, A brief anecdote for me, just
how tricky it can be. I had a long time
ago there was this store I used to go to,
this Asian grocery store called First Oriental. You know, it's
down the street from the Farmer's Market into cab and
(03:19):
I used to go there all the time to pick
up various things I would use when I was I
was cooking at home, and me and the lady was
like the proprietor got to know each other pretty well
sort of. And then one day she said, you know what,
you know who you look like? And I said, I
don't know who. I was very interested, and she said
Bradley Cooper, which is just fundamentally false. The only thing
(03:42):
me and that guy have in common is maybe one
or two mutual friends, and the fact that we both
have brown hair and maybe are genetically similar.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Well, you're both smolderingly good looking.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
That's so kind man, thank you.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
And just to have to back you up here. Ben's
not humble bragging there.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Bradley Cooper is in fact the closest best personal friend
of our boss Connel Burn.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
That's true. We can mention that on Let's come up Okay, yes,
yeah he is. He is with us defending the show
against the tyranny of Sheryl Crow.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Do you think Bradley Cooper has a body double?
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Ben?
Speaker 2 (04:17):
Just you know, for walking around times.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
I don't know. Definitely for do a shopping for him.
Definitely for characters and roles he plays. As an actor,
A lot of actors have body doubles for stunts or
for intimate romantic scenes, but.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
They don't have to look the same in the face.
Speaker 3 (04:34):
They mainly just have to be able to look the
same in profile, or like from behind or like from
a long shot.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Right Like when you see photographs of stunt doubles next
to their actors. It's it's kind of an uncanny Valley thing,
for sure, And occasionally it's a I'll say it, occasionally
it's a real life version of that. We have blanket
home meme.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
Right, you know what I'm talking about, Ben, It's I'll
send to you some Okay, I'll send youseth.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
For now we know that you are the real Nol Brown.
I am the real Ben Bolan. So far as we know,
there are no body doubles involved here.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
I refuse to stand up though, sir, right, And.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
We know that our super producer, Paul Mission controlled decand
is himself the one, the only, except no substitutions. But
today you and I are talking about real life body doubles,
not someone who just is a victim of beard blindness now,
(05:36):
not someone who vaguely looks like some other person with
brown hair.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Not the way Casey Pegram, super producer Casey Pegram has
a secret life in France as some sort of criminal
mastermind known as LaBouche.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Yes, that's an alternate identity right now.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
That's the same thing as a body double.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Right He's one guy with two identities that we know of.
A body double would be two seven real people who
share at least publicly a single identity.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
And specifically, today we're talking about political body doubles, which,
as it turns out, are pretty rare. Yes, it's a
pretty short listical episode, but all of them are nice
and beefy. A lot of good info out there, But
the ones that we do know of.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Yeah, we brought the juice and we wanted to be
sure that we didn't get lost in some quagmire speculation
real quick to set this up. You know why they're
increasingly rare, right, No, it's because of the rise of
photography and video. So you know, back in the thirteen hundreds,
someone could walk up with a letter and say, this
is a letter signed by someone else you've never met.
(06:38):
That's say, I am, you know, the Archduke of Hamington Sandwich,
which is maybe I'm paraphrasing.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
You must be.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Yeah, No, there's actually a story I heard through another
show that I'm working on in the music space. I
guess about how I think it was the Supremes, or
maybe it was the Commodores, a very influential, famous band
from that era, had a body double version of the
band that would tour simultaneously, so they could literally have
two versions of the show on the road at the
(07:09):
same time.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
That's crazy, dude. That reminds me of Morgan Freeman's voice double.
We talked about this before, I think, right, maybe not
on errow. Maybe we're just hanging out. So Morgan Freeman
has a voice double, and you know he's got such
an iconic, iconic resonance to his voice, a lot of
people want him to do a read for a commercial
(07:34):
or a cause or whatever. And apparently the story goes,
I'd love if someone can confirm this. The story goes
that he has two different kind of pricing structures. One
is if you can afford the actual Morgan Freeman, but
if you want the more economical choice. Word on the
street is he has like he officially co signs some
other guy to do Morgan Freeman voices. So it's crazy
(07:58):
can't get the real mf you can go for the
next best thing.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
I'm not trying to dog on voice actors because I
know it's definitely you know, it requires some skill, but
specifically what Morgan Freeman does, where he basically just is
Morgan Freeman all the time, that's kind of the height
of laziness. Like it's already an easy gig just to
be Morgan Freeman on Mike and read some ad copy
about credit card or something. But to have somebody else
(08:21):
kind of sub in for you and get the bargain
basement price. I don't know how I feel about that.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Morgan Freeman capitalism, baby roll the dice Yeah, it's interesting.
This is such a tangent, but there's also you know,
it leads us to one of those great divisions of actors.
A lot of a list amazing American actors are pretty
much themselves in films. Christopher Walken, al Pacino, I'll say it.
Keanu Reeves, who seems like a tremendous guy.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Sure does.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
So they have stunt doubles, but that's different. As you said, Nol,
getting to the point of our show, we do have
a point today, there are political body doubles. They are
much less common perhaps then fiction would have led us
to believe. So we'd like to go through a few
of these and get your take along the way. The
(09:10):
first one was a surprise to me. I was not
very familiar with this historical character. General Bernard Montgomery, known
as Monty to his friends, had a real life body
double named M. E. Clifton James. But why did he
have a body double? Right, he's a general. That's a
(09:31):
big deal, so maybe it's military related.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah, well it's true, so must call him Monty because
we're friends were familiar. Monty was a very influential general
who was responsible for a lot of the logistical planning
that went into the D Day invasion of Normandy, you know,
the big one. So they found it.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
They as an I five found it to be a
high priority to make sure that this guy was protected
in every sense of the word. Ah.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
Yes, because this is deep in the propaganda front of
the war. Both the Allied and Axis forces are trying
to trick one another with the publication of fake plans.
They're trying to lay some red herrings and mislead their opponents. So,
as you said, Noel m I five, I five says,
(10:23):
this guy's a valuable asset. He's instrumental to D Day
and other events and will will need him alive and
at the top of his mental game. But he's just
one man. And that's when they run into a man
named M. E. Clifton James. Emmy Clifton James is not
a general.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
He's not even British.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
He is an Australian actor. Yes, And so I five
approaches him and they say, okay, we need you to
do us as solid. We have a special mission for you.
You are going to dress like General Montgomery, you are
going to act like General Montgomery, and you were going
to travel around northern Africa, right publicly talking about Allied
(11:08):
plans within the earshot of Nazi spies who don't think
we've discovered them yet. So act like this guy, act
like Montgomery and walk around saying total fake malarkey plans.
Just be like, you know how truly put in all
of our forces in Lithuania.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
This reminds me of the story we did about poujel Lia,
the operative for the British Intelligence Agency who planted fake
stories with the Germans.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Yes, yeah, just so very very similar tactic.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
We had somebody who write this very nice thing on
Instagram about that too recently.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Right, it's pretty cool these people post like cool history
pictures and little captions.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Yeah, that's a good idea. A shout out to History
with Astro Astro who said that they really enjoyed our
account of Agent Garbo, which was one of that guy's
many nicknames. And you and I both looked through this account.
I really enjoy the different snapshots that History with an
(12:09):
Astro takes, you know, little vignettes for sure.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
Yes, there's a lot of those kind of accounts footing
around these days, and this one does a really good job.
So back to James, here's the thing. There was a
one little kink here. James had a missing finger, he
lost it during World War One, and he had a
prosthetic that would help him pass for Monty, you know,
and pull off the subterfuge.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
As long as he did have to type something right exactly.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
And James actually wrote an autobiography called I Was Montes's Double,
where he said that the Nazis were so completely taken
with his subterfuge, with his imitation, that they actually were
considering assassinating him.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
Yeah. Yeah, So here's specifically what he was spreading, and
here's how successful he was. According to his own autobiography,
he had propagated the idea that the Allied troops would
be coming from southern France, So the German forces moved
a ton of their troops to southern France because that's
where they thought the evasion would be based rather than Normandy.
(13:14):
So this worked. It's kind of tough to say how
much of a sway his actions his secret mission had
on German forces, but they definitely did play a part. Now,
this con this duplicity was pretty complicated because the best
(13:35):
way to teleconvincing falsehood is to make it very, very
closely related to the truth. It has to have a versimilitude, right,
and this meant that James had to be a full
on method actor sometimes in ways he did not appreciate.
I five told him that he could not drink booze
and he could not smoke tobacco because Montgomery didn't do that.
(13:57):
So it could blow the whole thing wide open if
you catch General Montgomery out back in an alleyway, you know,
sneakily puffing on something. And additionally, the General did like breakfast,
but he did not eat eggs, and he did not
eat pork, and he had kind of a spartan diet,
so he wouldn't use milk or sugar as porridge. So
(14:19):
all of that is out for James. He has to
become this other person like Dennis Reynolds says and always
sunny in Philadelphia to live within his skin.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
Indeed, went full Leo on that business. So this whole
operation was referred to as Copperhead. And it was conceived
in January of nineteen forty four when Brigadier Dudley Clark
saw a movie that inspired him, a movie called Five
Graves to Cairo.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Right right, This actor Miles Mander Dudley Clark sees him
playing a British officer and he thinks, well, heck, that
guy looks a lot like General Montgomery. This is a
different guy from Emmy James. Here's how it goes down,
he says, Dudley that is, says this guy will be
a great body double, and so he develops this concept.
(15:10):
But then they meet a huge snag. They arrange a
meeting with Miles Mandarin in person, and then they say,
oh no, way too tall, way too tall. General Montgomery,
you see, is a bit bantam. He is five foot
six bantam.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
You say, what does that mean?
Speaker 1 (15:27):
Technically it means kind of a small chicken, but.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
It's also a weight class in boxing, U huh.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Bantam weight. It also uses is slangly used to refer
to people of diminutive stature with combative disposition.
Speaker 3 (15:40):
It's a vocabulary corner with then and all bantam. I
love that word. So, yeah, dude's a little short, he's
a little prince like.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Yeah sure yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
Uh So they say, Okay, that's not going to work.
Everyone will clock that immediately if they meet him in person,
and a true body double has to be effective in person,
so they can't find any other actors, and they think
maybe this, maybe it's just not in the cards for
us to pull off this coup. Until that is a
(16:12):
guy named Stephen Watts, who's an mi I five officer.
Happens across a photo of a British Army lieutenant named
Emmy Clifton James who is dressed as the General for
a stage show.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
Weird, weird, so many weird little happenstancey things that happen here.
And this guy was sort of a lesser known Australian actor,
sort of a Toast of London type character. He was
forty six, so he was you know, it wasn't happening
for him, but he had been in this production and
they He then was assigned to the Royal Army pay
(16:44):
Corps and was based in Leicester, not Leicester like you
think it would be pronounced when you look at it
on paper.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
It's a tricky one. It's a really but it's like
Worcester in Massachusetts.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
But it's almost like, I think I'm still gonna get
yelled at even though because I said it wrong. Even
though I said it right, I said that I wanted
to say wrong. And that's just as bad as saying
it wrong. Nah man lean into it all right. It's
a living language. So Leicester is Ray's base working for
the Army, Royal Army pay Corps. And he kind of
did little side gigs as as an actor on the
(17:13):
you know, when he wasn't when he had free time.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
M h that Watts and Clark made this happen.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Yeah, yeah, that's right. Stephen Watts and Dudley Clark put
this operation Copperhead into motion and it worked. As we said.
Emmy James had to go full Daniel day Lewis and
assume the role of Montgomery. It wasn't super pleasant for him,
but by gosh, by golly, by gummy, he did it
and pulled it off successfully. This was This was admitted
(17:47):
by General Montgomery himself. On May eighth, nineteen sixty three.
Emmy Clifton James died. He was sixty five years old.
When the General received word, he said, he performed a
very useful had a very dark time of the wool.
What he did completely fooled the Germans.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Is that your Churchill voice?
Speaker 1 (18:06):
It's no, no, No, Churchill voice is way more RiPP roar.
Is it offensive?
Speaker 3 (18:09):
That's just sort of your General British official voice, and
you'll notice this guy's voice changed.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
He's got two different voices here. Yeah, so the General
totally co signs this. But we have to ask ourselves.
Did he completely fool the Germans? It would seem so
for his part. Yeah, But this was one of several
other operations going on.
Speaker 3 (18:35):
Because again our guy Poujol was heavy, heavily involved in
this kind of campaign of deception as well. There was
another operation, but they were happening in tandem because both
revolved around D Day and the planning of D Day
and making sure the Germans did not know where it
was going to happen, absolutely where they were going to
invade on the beach.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
So on a one to ten success scale for this
body double the Stoppelganger, I gotta say man a ten,
especially considering that he had to wear a fake finger
and he still pulled it off. How did that work out?
Where they just like the General doesn't shake.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Hands exactly, all right, that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
Howie Mandel doesn't shake hands.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
He's a notorious germophobe, right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Yeah, he's a fist bumper all day. So this is
one of those rare cases of a proven, documented, successful
body double, but it's not the only one. We'll stay
roughly within the same time period, give or take a
few decades, and let's travel across the Iron Curtain. No,
(19:44):
why are we going to Russia for the next story.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Why wouldn't we? We've both been watching Chernobyl. I mean,
it seems like an obvious place to go, seems like.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
A great place. It's a it's a learning opportunity, it
really is.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
No another famous body double, or one that we know of,
at least was one belonging to I guess you could
say Joseph Stalin.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Yeah, yeah, Joseph Stalin, one time leader of the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics or USSR, and by.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
All accounts a real pill, a real pill and nearing
the end of his life, especially very paranoid. I mean,
it seems like Soviet culture sort of engenders that overall,
like with the KGB and everyone feeling like they're followed
and tapping phones and what do they say, confirm.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Or trust but verify.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
Yes, that's sort of the doctrine of the KGB or
of like Russian intelligence in general. So it basically means
trust no one.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
So there's so many strange facts about this guy. First off,
we still have people arguing about when his actual birthday is.
He was born in Joseph Visyyanovich Jugashvili and I am
woefully mispronouncing that. And then when he was thanks Tilt
for that slow clap. And then when he was in
(21:02):
his thirties he changed his name to Stalin because it
means man of steel.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
Got a nice ring to it.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
The balls on this guy, seriously, brass now steel, the
steal off the steel on this guy.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
So during his time during the Second World War, he
of course became concerned that someone would attempt to assassinate
him and the predecessors of the KGB, the Soviet secret
police started recruiting people to be decoys more or less
for Stalin. So he had like a team of doubles. Yeah,
he had a gang. Mm hmm, he really had a Doppelgang.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
That's good, Ben, that's all right. Seven out of ten.
I liked it, thank you. I would have given it
an eight point five thank you. That's very kind.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
So yeah, we looked into this, and the thing is
that he was given these political decoys in World War Two.
But it is widely suspected that he kept them employed
for the rest of his life.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Right, there's also some conjecture that he faked his own
death and that it was one of these decoys in
his coffin, which which that would imply that he had
to have them killed in his place. I don't pretty
cold blooded. I don't think that would be a problem
for him. No, I don't think so either. I think
it would just be another Tuesday self sacrifice. But I'm
(22:18):
telling you, I'm so steeped in Chernobyl right now. To
serve what is it to serve the USSRU?
Speaker 1 (22:24):
What was the what was there? Was that film that
came out maybe a year ago or so.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
The Death of Stalin? That's it's fantastic, it's great. Jeff
is in it.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
And wait does he play He doesn't play Stalin, Steve
as Shemi plays Krushev and the whole kind of you know,
gimmick of the movie. It's not a gimmicky movie at all.
This this totally isn't an issue. Everyone just has their
own accent. No one uses Russian accent. Steve Bismi as
Khrushchev sounds just like Steve Bushemy as Steve Bushmi.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
It's fantastic. Yes, I recommend it so highly.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
It's it's the guy, uh, what's his name, Ianucci, who
is the creator of Weep and another political series.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
It's British political series.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
But it's just really sharp, really funny and really disturbing,
and it really shows.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
This whole culture of paranoia. I don't remember if the
Doubles played into it or not.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
I don't remember either. I need to rewatch it. But
it totally nails that Gallows humor or the paranoia, and
it is based on fact. We could do an entire
episode about the weird death of Stalin now that it's
in question. So during his rise to power, he implemented
numerous murder plots against people are citizens of the Soviet Union.
(23:39):
Anyone who opposed him would go to a fake trial
and be executed or kangaroo court right or they would
just disappear. And he kind of functioned under a sort
of unfortunate self fulfilling prophecy. He was a man convinced
that he was surrounded by enemies, and his behavior create
(24:00):
a roster of people who very much wanted him dead
or knew that their lives would be easier if he
was out of the picture. We know for sure that
he had at least two body doubles that he called
political decoys, but there may have been there may have
been many more. One one is named Rashid. That's even
(24:23):
now in twenty nineteen. That's all we know about the
guy is like his first name.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
We also know of a man named Felix Dadyev, who
is another of one of his body doubles who we
are aware of. And here's the thing.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
It's tough to prove that any political leader used a.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
Body dumble it is. It is because they would not
want that information out there. This is not something they
would want to broadcast. It's also kind of it's not
embarrassing exactly, but it certainly tips your hand. If if
it's like a known thing, it removes all effectiveness, absolutely
all efficacy of the Yet so we did.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
We don't find out about Rashid and Felix for a
long long time. Rashid actually dies in nineteen ninety one
at age ninety three, so the double outlived the original.
But because we know more about Felix da Diev, maybe
we can explore his story a little similar to Emmy
James at least in my opinion, he was like an
(25:24):
actor trying to make it happen. Right.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
Oh, get this though, dude, Felix Dadev didn't even it
didn't come out officially that he had been one of
I believe the very least four of Stalin's doubles that
we know until April until two thousand and eight, So
I mean, this is pretty new information.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Uh. And I believe.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
Daddeev got permission, special permission from Putin himself to be
able to come out with this information for his own purposes,
so we could like write a book about it. Yeah,
and he was eighty eight, so that we know about
Russia though, wouldn't you think I would have thought that
Putin would have said.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Sir, it was a different times, it was a different time.
And also that kind of that kind of information when
it comes out is useful for them. It becomes a
situation where you want people to know. It makes someone
clever full you exactly. So Dadyev during the time that
(26:21):
the Second World War breaks out is an actor, an illusionist,
and a magician.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
Pretty cool, Pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
So he was all set to travel to the UK
as a member of the state, singing and dance band
of Ukraine. But when the war broke out, he got
reassigned to a concert brigade. So entertaining the troops certainly
what we.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
Have in the States with the USO, where you know,
to entertain the troops, keep moral up and all of
that exactly.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
However, in the Soviet military, if you're a soldier, you're
a soldier. You're a soldier, meaning that he still had
to fight while juggling and doing magic illusions.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Yeah, seriously. Yeah, and Dancy, he had it harder than
any of them.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
He was a triple threat that was pressed into quadruple
threat status. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
And this, this, you know, eventually led to him being
quite badly injured.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
In nineteen forty two.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Right during the Russian liberation of Grosny. His family is
notified that he has died. But here's what actually happened.
In nineteen forty three, He's flown to a small cottage
near Moscow and the Secret police tell him that he
needs to forge a new identity as Stalin's body double.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
So they're capitalizing on the fact that he's been reported
as dead.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Correct, Yeah, yeah, I mean it's great, he's a ghost
at this point.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
M so no one's going to look for a ghost.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Exactly exactly, So he starts training to become the spitting
image of Stalin, both in appearance and behavior. The problem
is that this guy at this point is is in
his what his mid twenties or something. Yeah, and Stalin
is sixty years old.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Look at the very least.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
So they really have to implement some serious like you know,
prosthetics and movie magic kind of stuff to really age
this guy.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
And so he watches repeated, repeated samples of Stalin's public speeches,
of his ambulatory habits. How he's walking is.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
The way you hear method actors work. You know, we're
like training to be portray someone in a film.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
You go through.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
Every possible archival, you know, foot piece of footage that
you can, and you learn their mannerisms. You learn the
way they move and the way that their facial expressions are,
any ticks that they have, you know, and he kind
of tells, really really interesting.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
This is so wild. Okay. So his his first gig
is pretty intimidating. He is tasked to stand in for
Yosef Stalin at the Kremlin, and the idea was that
if he can convince ministers and committee leaders that he
is actually Stalin, then he can officially be employed as
(29:02):
a political decoy. And it worked. It worked so well
that they sent him to talk to other international leaders, right,
that's true.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
He went to Yalta to meet with Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
This is so cool that we have so much information
about everything that he actually did, straight from his mouth
and with the approval of the state no less. Yeah,
he met with Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to discuss the
reorganization of Europe after the war. And here's the thing.
He had a sort of a cross purpose here. He
was meant to be a decoy that allowed the real
(29:37):
Stalin to land in Yalta and not be noticed. So
he was sort of like a decoy in a separate plane.
It made his exit, and then the real Stalin was,
you know, landed elsewhere.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
Yeah, exactly. So he said that he had had he
not impressed the chief of the Secret police or Stalin's
personal head of security details, he probably would have been shot.
He believes that because they couldn't let the political decoy
story be in the news at all. Even so, if
the guy was an unsuccessful audition, right, then they can't
(30:12):
have him walking around looking like Stalin, knowing all these
intimate details. Because he was successful, he was forced to
sign an NDA, or non disclosure agreement that prevented him
from saying anything about his role as Stalin's body double
for decades after Stalin's death in nineteen fifty three. He
(30:35):
was also never able to tell his family that he
was alive. He could never tell them what he was
doing for the Soviet government. And this was so ironclad
that when Stalin died and they never and they needed
no more body doubles, he had to create an entirely
different identity for himself. And that's how we came to
(30:56):
know the musician Tom Waits.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
Exactly funny thing too, Bene. When I think of a double, like,
I think of them as like buddies, like hanging out
and stuff. You know, I don't know why, And that's
where my that's where my mind goes. Yeah, not the case,
my friends, not the case. Felix only met Stalin one
time in his entire life, and near the end of
Stalin's life in nineteen fifty three. And there's a fantastic
(31:22):
article on history collection dot co that goes through a
lot of this chronology called The Strange Life of Joseph
Stalin's Body Double by Donna Patricia Ward, and she quotes
this from this from this meeting, saying that Stalin quote again,
this is from the autobiography quote.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Smiled and gave me an approving nod, and that was it.
I told you what I saw you, hey, man validated.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
You don't want to talk to that guy?
Speaker 2 (31:47):
No, probably not.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
People will die, absolutely And can you imagine how I mean,
you could almost have a heart attack from being in
the same room with that guy and just making an
eye contact. Seriously, if he smiles and nods, that's it.
That's you got what you came for. You're a ghost.
Now disappear. Don't let him see you again. He might
change his mind. So now we've upped the stakes because
(32:12):
now we have a guy who has multiple body doubles.
We have one more example for today, which is much
more recent and even even goes a little past our
usual caveat. We usually try to keep things, you know
in the three Yeah, yeah, because of the gorilla. Yeah,
(32:34):
so we that is true. Check out our episode where
we pretty much spontaneously decided.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
That yeah, I still feel good about it. I am
totally fine with this is the right call on our part.
Uh So, now we're journeying to the Middle East Rock specifically,
this is the story of Saddam Hussein. Like Yoso Stalin,
Saddam Hussein apparently used more than one body double for
(33:00):
the war. Many people in Iraq said they could tell
the real Saddam from one of his multiple lookalikes, not
by watching him but are the person pretending to be him,
but by watching his bodyguards, which were around him at
all times. Yeah, and Saddam was reported to have had
(33:23):
a veritable menagerie, a harem. I don't know what do
you call a group of employees. None of those words apply.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Doppelgang is still.
Speaker 3 (33:32):
Found, the total doppel gang. Yeah, he really did. He
had multi multiples while he ruled Iraq. And this is
according to US intelligence. So you had mentioned earlier, Ben
that there was some there were some tells that the
bodyguards would have that would kind of let folks know
who knew what to look for, whether they were dealing
(33:53):
with the real artic of the real deal, or you know, one.
Speaker 2 (33:55):
Of these one of these copycats.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Yeah, So if the bodyguard appeared a little too casual,
or if they appeared to laugh at jokes or something.
A lot of Araki's took that as a tip off
that they were not guarding the real Saddam, because they
just they wouldn't be that chill and relax if it
was the genuine article.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
Another tell from the Washington Times.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
Washington Times reports an article called the fate of Saddam's
Lookalikes remained unknown was the fact that Saddam himself was
a big fan of close ups.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Very very vain guy.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. This is This is
the same guy, by the way, who was a fairly
prolific author of romance novels.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Erotic fiction. Dare we say, yeah, which like sex mysteries.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
Yes, that's it. That's one of that's one of our
new favorite idioms or expressions. We gotta, we gotta bring
that into the fold on air. But yes, he loved
to close up. He was a bit of a ham.
The problem is that when you have a look alike,
you need to keep a distance totally.
Speaker 3 (35:08):
Eric shadows the illusion because again, this is one that's
much more in the era of constant around the clock,
twenty four hour news cycle, you know.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
Right, because now we're in the digital age, and streaming
video can be transported across the planet very easily, so
there are more opportunities to determine whether someone is a
body double. People were so concerned about this, and I
love that you mentioned US intelligence earlier in People were
so concerned about this that when Saddam Hussein was captured
(35:39):
in two thousand and three, then Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld said, Okay, we need to figure out if we
have the real guy, you know what I mean, or
if we just have some hapless person who is forced
to be Saddam Hussein.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Well, surely every ready's don't we know about these doubles?
They wouldn't have been so hapless, right, It would have
been almost a privilege for me.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
It seems to be like Felix Dadiev strikes me as
someone who made a patriotic decision, So did Emmy James,
so we can only imagine it would be it would
be similar, right. So Rumsfeld was so concerned about this
that he demanded they do DNA testing because you know,
(36:20):
some of these body doubles have probably spent decades at
this point mirroring the real deal totally.
Speaker 3 (36:26):
And I do want to back down my previous statement,
a lot of these folks were in fact forced to
do this.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
There's a film called The Devil's.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Double that came out in twenty eleven that kind of
looks at the Saddam Hussein regime through the eyes of
a double that was meant for his son, Ude, who
was a real piece of work himself in his own right.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Yeah, big time, and this man was forced to do this.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Yeah, yeah, I think I've seen that film. So Rumsfeld,
you know, he's so paranoid about this that he demands
they collect DNA and he accepted it finally as ninety
nine point something percent proof positive that this was the
genuine Saddam Hussein. And he also emphasized, he said, look,
(37:12):
when we caught him, Saddam Hussein admitted his identity and
several of his former cabinet members confirmed he wasn't a
body double. But his body doubles were so dedicated to
this job that they had undergone plastic surgery, and they
could have even had things like tattoos, bullet holes, or
(37:35):
moles that would make them appear to look even more
like the leader. And as I think it's really interesting
that you mentioned Ude Hussein that's his oldest son, right,
so his body double the guy in real life named
Latif Yahia. Y Ahia your school chums, I believe. Yeah,
(37:57):
they went to school, right, And then he, like all
Iraqi citizens at the time, had mandatory military service. It's
part of growing up. So in nineteen eighty eight he
is enlisted non consensually to be UDA's body double. And
then he said it was pretty He said Oude was
a psychopath. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
There's even a story where from a former Iraqi soccer
player by the name of Shahar Haydar who said that
during a match with Jordan, the team lost and he
personally was dragged across the ground with two other players
and then they were forced to take their shirts off,
and they tied their feet together and pulled their knees
(38:39):
over a bar while they were on their back, and
then they dragged them across the concrete, peeling the skin
off of their backs. And then they would force them
to get in a sand pit so there would be
sand in the wounds on the really really really psychotic,
grizzly stuff. They even made them climb a ladder and
jump into a vat of raw sewage with these open wounds,
and it was the idea that like they would, they
(39:00):
would do that to them until they won. Seems like
really good motivation there.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
Let's talk a little bit about Uday Hussein. Writing for
The Guardian, Suzanne Goldenberg looks into this guy's behavior in
life and he's incredibly dangerous and imbalanced. He was a
sadist with a taste for cruelty so extreme that his
father had to say, this kid is not a worthy air.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
He's a real Jeoffrey Lanister type figure.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Totally yeah, one hundred percent on that. So when he
was overseeing these soccer teams, he apparently kept a private
torture scorecard where he would write instructions on how many
times someone should be beaten according to how they performed
in a losing game. He was a notorious sexual predator.
(39:52):
He would order any girl or woman who caught his
eye to be brought to his private pleasure doom. So
this was this was a place with It was on
his father's estate, with indoor fountains, big erotic murals, HIV
testing facilities, and huge stashes of drugs. He had another
just straight up torture chamber secreted somewhere away on the
(40:15):
banks of the Tigris. He shot one of his uncles
in the leg. In nineteen eighty eight, he bludgeoned his
father's bodyguard to death in front of people at a party,
and yeah, it was just worse and worse and worse.
So I would hate to be his body double. Oh absolutely,
I almost would rather. I don't know, it's tough to say.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
I kind of want to see the film. I have
not seen it. I've just read a little bit about it,
so I understand that.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
It's pretty visceral and a lot of the stuff is
dealt with, and this person is basically like living in
fear of his own life. Not to ment to the
fact that he is being a body double for a
man who is universally despised.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Yeah, probably people gunning for him all the time.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
Great point to people know that he's not the real
ude because he's not killing people parties. That's a very
dubious distinction. Yeah. So eventually Oude passes away in July
of two thousand and three. He had already at this
point been imprisoned several times, been exiled several times, and
even received a kind of sort of death sentence from
(41:18):
his father's government. So our thoughts go out to anybody,
especially to Latif who anybody who had to be a
body double for someone that violent and destructive. And these
are so these are just three examples of real life
proven body doubles. I guess we could say four examples,
(41:40):
because you know, we're two Hussein's deep at this point.
But there are many, many more alleged body doubles.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Right. A guy named Joe R.
Speaker 3 (41:49):
Reader, who served as undersecretary for the US Army, gave
an interview with Fox News in one where he kind
of intimated that there were some others that he knew of.
He said, Osama bin Laden likely have, which makes a
lot of sense, being that he was so doggedly being
hunted by the US military.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
Uh, and also Manuel Noriega. What are some other ones been?
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Well, of course there's Fidel Castro. I don't know if
I was body double level, but I did a pretty
good Castro costume one Halloween really in yester years. Yes, yeah,
I have the jacket for it in the hat. It's
mainly what it is.
Speaker 3 (42:30):
He's need a really nice square beard, yeah, and a cigar,
and I could grow I could grow beards pretty quickly.
Speaker 2 (42:35):
Nice offensively superpower.
Speaker 1 (42:36):
Dude, it's a very inconvenient superpower because I'm a guy
who likes to drink milkshakes and eat soup and I
just can't. Okay, I have a min's respect for you, man.
You have a great beard. I don't know if you
guys know this about my co host here, but he
has a he has a fantastic and well quoifed beard.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
No, I know because of beard blindness from the top
of the show, remember, yeah, but we need to we
need to thanks for big up in my bear. Here's
some other ones that aren't body doubles. Winston Churchill was
reported and you could have been this guy Ben. Honestly
sure he could do such a good, such a good impersonation. Yeah,
used a voice impersonator, a man named Norman Shelley to
(43:15):
do these like again, it's sort of like what we're
talking about with Morgan Freeman, just kind of like laziness
like he did. He didn't want to do those morning
breakfast chats every day, so he had someone else.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
He was probably tanked, right, yeah, hungover exactly.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
That makes perfect sense then, an aid to Henry Kissinger
has been on record saying that when Kissinger went to
China on a secret mission to China and seventy one
he used an impersonator at least one time.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
So is this okay? Here's my question is we had
earlier talked about what a what a rich person's toy
a blimp must be, Like you own a blimp? Yeah,
then your blimp riche You're you're blimpriche. You're frivolously possibly
offensively wealthy.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
Blimpridge is a funny thing to say. It sounds like
it's own word.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
It sounds somehow like a curse work. It does, But
I love it. So I'm thinking that having your own
body double is another one of those rarefied luxuries of
billionaires in the elite, you know what I mean totally.
I'm supposed to take the blimp out to the Builderberg conference,
but I believe I'll send my body double.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
Here's the thing, though, it only matters if it has
to be you, right, Otherwise it's just called a servant,
that's true, or like an assistant or something like that. Right,
someone is to go do errands, be a runner for you.
So you have to not only be wealthy, you have
to kind of be pretty damn important and need to
have a lot of FaceTime that either you don't feel
like doing or that could actually put you in danger.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
And there have been many other body doubles or alleged
body doubles throughout history. There was even a Mexican politician,
Renato Trunco Gomez, who held a national competition in twenty
fifteen to try to find the best candidates to be
as body doubles, which might defeat the purpose. And I
(45:05):
think in China this may still be going on. Wealthy
people who are sentenced to serve time in prison or jail,
they can engage in the practice of hiring what's called
a replacement convict. So you get sentenced, you get a
guilty plea, but then you just pay someone else to
(45:26):
go to jail for you must be nice. I don't
want anyone to go to jail, right.
Speaker 2 (45:32):
I hope you're a good person, Ben, You've got a
kind heart.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
That's very that's a that's very kind of you. Just say,
and this is our episode. Look now I have to
ask you, know you don't have to, I feel compelled
to ask, do you do you have any body double
observations or doppelganger observations?
Speaker 2 (45:51):
With which you agreed.
Speaker 1 (45:52):
Did someone ever say something like, hey, you know you
you kind of look like or sound like, doesn't have
to be faced. You also maybe sound like this person
you agreed and said. It wasn't just the beer.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
You know, it comes up a lot.
Speaker 3 (46:04):
It's really weird. I've heard this multiple times from listeners
writing in. They say that I sound like Dwight from
the Office.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
I've heard this.
Speaker 3 (46:11):
I don't hear it. I don't get it, and I
love the Office and I like Dwight, but I don't
know what it is. And I've only really seen the
British version of the Office.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
Oh, the American version is great, That's what I hear.
I hear great things.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
So maybe maybe I can make a call on that
when I'm more familiar with it. But yeah, we have
received several emails regarding that.
Speaker 3 (46:28):
My god, now that's not so I'm doing. I'm doing
job from Arrested Development. Oh yeah, I don't even know
who still reminds me very I'm going to say it.
I know it's not his favorite thing. Maybe aware we're
all kind of a big family here. How stuff works.
One of our producers, brilliant guy, friend of the show
and personal friend of mine named Chandler Mays always freaks
(46:51):
me out by how much he resembles the actor who
plays Job in Arrested Development.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
He does a little bit.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
I can that saw so much in the face. It's
the swag, it's the mannerism. Yeah, yeah, it's the love
of illusions. Very true.
Speaker 2 (47:03):
It's a very big, big, big sweeping hand movements. I
agree with that. Well, this has been an episode, and
I think it was a pretty good one.
Speaker 3 (47:11):
I don't know if I do say so myself. Yes, yeah,
I want to get too big here, and I want
to know get too big league.
Speaker 1 (47:17):
No. Yeah. When I have a meeting with the other
Ben Bolan later this weekend, and I think he'll be
he'll be really glad to know that this went well.
In the meantime, we'd like to hear from you. Do
you ever get a let's all be nice to each
other on the internet? Do you ever get repeated comparisons
(47:38):
either in your voice, your mannerisms, or your appearance, and
if so, do you agree with that? Do you have
like do you have like thirty eight people a day
tell you that you look like Natalie Portman? You know,
I had a long time so I had a very
difficult time differentiating for years Natalie Portman and Paul What's
her cure? And Knightley.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
Yeah, I could see that it looks similar.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Yeah, well that's on me. Maybe I have face blind.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
Do you remember the show The Adventures of Pete and Pete.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
I'm familiar with it.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
And huge fan.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
There's a character on it called Endless Mike who's kind
of a bully, and for the longest time I thought
that was young Sam.
Speaker 1 (48:14):
Rockwell, I remember you mentioned this earlier, and then.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Some friends of some of friends of ours who are
also big fans of the show thought the same thing.
Speaker 1 (48:22):
Well, maybe you're onto something. Let us know. Let us
know your favorite doppelganger look alike or body double stories.
You can find us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. For Facebook,
we highly recommend checking out our favorite part of the show,
your fellow listeners on our page or Ridiculous Historians.
Speaker 3 (48:38):
Yeah, and if you want to find me individually on Instagram,
you can look me up at how Now Noel Brown And.
Speaker 1 (48:45):
If you want to find me on Instagram, I believe.
Most recently I was looking into the problematic past of
Belgian comic strips at the Belgian Comic Strip Museum. That
instagram is at ben Bowling.
Speaker 2 (48:58):
If you don't want to do any of that stuff,
you can us an email. We do have one. It
is ridiculous at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (49:04):
And of course, as always, thanks to our superproducer Paul
I'm standing in for super producer Casey Pegram like a champ.
Thanks to Alex Williams who composed our theme. Thanks to
Gabe Lucier who helped us put this episode together research wise.
Speaker 1 (49:17):
Yeah, thanks to Christopher Hasiotis. Because we just liked we
just like to thank him in general.
Speaker 3 (49:22):
Jonathan Strickland, the Quizzer can go right to help. Thanks
to Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1 (49:27):
To aka the Quizzor, thanks so much to you for listening,
and Noel, thank you for being you. You know, if
you are a body double right now, I will say
that you are doing a top notch job. I do.
Speaker 2 (49:38):
I take my work very seriously. See you, letter folks.
Speaker 3 (50:02):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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