June 11, 2019 • 49 mins
Has anyone ever told you you resemble a celebrity? Have you ever thought of making this resemblance your job? In today’s episode, the guys explore real-life stories of body doubles, from World War II to surprisingly recent events.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
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 uh.
It's also often said that everyone on the planet statistically
has a doppelganger, A dope. Who's your doppel ben I
(00:50):
don't know, no, I could. I get a lot of references,
many of which are completely whoosh 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 get a lot of like looks of recognition that
you then have to process and realize, like, Okay, way
is this real or is this someone imagining that I
am someone to they think I might be, but I'm
(01:12):
actually not. 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 us specific
maybe a facial feature like a beard, for instance, that
happened to you, right, man? Do you know how many
people with beards I get compared to. And the thing
(01:34):
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 quoft face Maine, you know,
like me, and then we're the same person. I Uh,
this is I call it beard blindness. If that's great beards,
that's great, man, that's that feels like a real thing.
Uh grief anecdote for me, just how tricky it can be. UM,
(01:57):
I had UH long time ago, there was this UH
store I used to go to, uh, this Asian grocery
store called UH First Oriental. You know, it's down the
street from the Farmer's Market into cab and 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
(02:21):
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 me and
that guy have in common is is maybe one or
two mutual friends, and the fact that we both have
(02:42):
brown hair and maybe our genetically similar well you're both
smolderingly good looking. That's so kind man, thank you, And
just to just to to have to back you up here,
Ben's not humble bragging there. Bradley Cooper is in fact
the closest best personal friend of our boss ConL Burn's true.
We can mention that on it. Let's come, okay, yes,
yeah he is. Uh, he is with us, uh, defending
(03:05):
the show against the tyranny of Cheryl Crowe. Do you
think Bradley Cooper has a body double then, just you know,
for walking around times, I don't know. Definitely for a
shopping for him, Definitely for um characters and rules he
plays As an actor, A lot of actors have body
doubles for stunts or for intimate romantic scenes so they
(03:25):
don't have to look the same in the face. They
mainly just have to be able to look the same
in profile or like from behind or like from a
long shot right like when you see photographs of stunt
doubles next to their actors, Uh you it's it's kind
of an uncanny Valley thing and occasionally it's a I'll
say it. Occasionally it's a real life version of that.
(03:47):
We have Blanke at home, meme, do you know what
I'm talking about? It's uh, I'll send you something. Okay,
I'll send you something. For now we know, uh, we
know that you are the real Null Brown. I am
the real Ben Boland. So far as we know, there
are no body doubles involved here. I refused to stand
up those sir, all right, and uh, and we know
(04:08):
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, not
(04:30):
someone who vaguely looks like some other person with brown hair.
Not the way Casey Pegram, super producer Casey Pegram has
a secret life in France as some sort of criminal
mastermind known as Yes, that's a that's an alternate identity, right,
the same thing as a body double. Right, He's one
guy with two identities that we know of. A body
(04:51):
double would be two separate real people who share at
least publicly a single identity. And specifically today we're talking
about political body double, which, as it turns out, are
pretty rare. This is a pretty shortlistical episode, but all
of them are nice and beefy. A lot of good
info out there, but the ones that we do know of, Yeah,
we brought the juice and we wanted to be sure
(05:11):
that we didn't get lost in some quagmire speculation. Real
quick to set this up. You know why they're increasingly rare, right,
you know, 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. That's say,
(05:31):
I am, you know, the arch Duke of Hammington's Sandwich,
which is maybe I'm paraphrasing, you must be um, Yeah, no,
it's 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 Commodore's, a very influential famous UM band
(05:53):
from that era, had a body double version of the
band that would tour simultaneously. They could literally have two
versions of the show on the road at the same time.
That's crazy, dude. This that reminds me of Morgan Freeman's
voice double. We talked about this before. I think, right,
maybe not on Arrow. Maybe we're just hanging out. So
(06:13):
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 or a cause or whatever whatever. And apparently
the story goes, I love if someone can confirm this.
The story goes that he has two different kind of
(06:36):
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.
Can't get the real mf you can go for the
next best thing. I'm not trying to dog on voice
(06:56):
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 kind of sub in for you can
get the bargain basement price. I don't know how I
(07:17):
feel about that. Morgan Freeman, capitalism, baby roll the dice. Yeah,
it's 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 walkin
Al Pacino, I'll say it. Keanu Reeves, who seems like
(07:38):
a tremendous guy. Do so they have stunt doubles, but
that's different, as you said, no getting to the point
of our show. We do have a point today. Uh,
there are political body doubles. They are much less common,
perhaps than fiction would have led us to believe. So
we'd like to go through a few of these and
(08:00):
uh and get your take along the way. The first
one was it 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
(08:21):
he have a body double right. He's a general. That's
a big deal. So maybe it's military related. Yeah, well
that's true. So UM must call him Monty because we're friends,
were familiar. Monty was UM 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,
(08:41):
the big one. So UM they found it. They as
an m I five, found it to be a high
priority to make sure that this guy was protected in
every sense of the word. Ah. Yes, because this is
deep in the propaganda front of the war. Both the
Allied and Axis forces are trying to um to trick
(09:05):
one another with the publication of fake plans. They're trying
to lay some red herrings and mislead their opponents. So,
as you said, no m I five, m I five says,
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
(09:27):
one man. And that's when they run into a man
named M. E. Clifton James. Emmy Clifton James is not
a general, he's not even British. Is an Australian actor. Yes,
and so m I five approaches him and they say, okay,
we need you to do us a solid. We have
a special mission for you. You are going to dress
(09:49):
like General Montgomery, you are going to act like General Montgomery,
and you are going to travel around Northern Africa right
publicly talking about Allied plans uh 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
(10:11):
saying total fake malarkey plans. Just just be like, you know,
uh how actually putting all of our forces in Lithuania.
This reminds me of the story we did about Pugel Leah,
the operative for the British Intelligence agency who planted fake
stories with the Germans. Yes, yeah, just so very very
(10:32):
similar tactic. We had some of you write it's a
very nice thing on Instagram about that too recently. Right,
it's pretty cool these posts like cool history pictures and yeah,
that's a good idea. Shout out to history with Astro
A s t r O who said that they really
enjoyed our our account of Agent Garbo, which which was
(10:54):
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 astro uh takes, you know,
little vignettes, for sure. 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 um here. James had
(11:15):
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 as
long as he did have to type something right exactly.
And James actually wrote an autobiography called I Was Montese
Double Um where he said that the Nazis were so
um completely taken with his subterfuge, with with his intimitation,
(11:40):
that they actually were considering assassinating him. 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
(12:01):
their troops to southern France because that's where they thought
the evasion would be based rather than normandy, So this worked.
We It's it's kind of tough to say how much
of a sway his his actions his secret mission had
on German forces, but they definitely did play a part. Now,
(12:21):
this con this, uh, this duplicity was pretty complicated because
the best way to tell convincing falsehood is to make
it very very closely related to the truth. It has
to have a very similitude, right, and this meant that
James had to be a full on method actor sometimes
in ways he did not appreciate. M I five told
(12:43):
him that he could not drink booze and he could
not smoke tobacco because Montgomery didn't do that. 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
(13:05):
eat pork, and he he had kind of a spartan diet,
so he wouldn't use milk or sugar as porridge. So
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. Indeed went
folio on that business. Um. So this whole operation um
(13:26):
was referred to as copper Head and it was conceived
in January when Brigadier Dudley Clark saw a movie that
inspired him, a movie called Five Graves to Cairo. Right right,
this this actor Miles Mander h Dudley Clark sees him
playing a British officer and he thinks, well, heck, that
(13:48):
guy looks a lot like General Montgomery. And 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.
But then they meet a huge snag. They arrange a
meeting with Miles Mander in person, and then they say,
(14:11):
oh no, way too tall, way too tall. General Montgomery,
you see, is a bit bantam. He has five ft
six bantom. You say, what does that mean? Technically it
means kind of a small chicken, but it's also a
weight class in boxing, bantam weight. And it also uses
its slangily used to refer to people of diminutive stature
(14:32):
with combative disposition. Vocabulary corner with that and all bantam bantom,
I love that word. So yeah, dudes, a little shorty's
a little prince like. Sure. Yeah. So so they say, okay,
that's not gonna work. Everyone will clock that immediately if
they meet him in person, and a true body double
(14:52):
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 coupe. Until that is a guy named Stephen Watts
who's in My five Officer. Happens across a photo of
a British Army lieutenant named Emmy Clifton James who was
(15:14):
dressed as the General for a stage show. Weird, weird,
so many weird little happenstancey things that happened here. Uh.
And this guy was sort of a lesser known Australian actor,
sort of a Toast of London type character. Uh. He
was forty six, so he was you know, it wasn't
happening for him, but he he had been in this
production and they He then was assigned to the Royal
(15:36):
Army pay Corps and was based in Leicster, not Leicester
like you think it would be pronounced when you look
at it on paper. It's a tricky one. It's really
but it's like Worster in Massachusetts. But it's almost like,
I think I'm still gonna get yelled at even because
I said it wrong, even though I said it right.
I said that I wanted to say it wrong, and
that's just as bad as saying it wrong. Man, lean
into it, all right. It's a living language. So Leicester
(15:58):
is where he's based, working for the Army, Royal Army
pay Corps, and he kind of did little side gigs
as as an actor on the side, you know, when
he wasn't when he had free time. Um that Watts
and Clark made this happen. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Stephen
Watts and Dudley Clark put this operation Copperhead into motion
(16:20):
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 gum, he did it and pulled it off successfully.
This was this was admitted by General Montgomery himself on
(16:42):
May eighth, nine six three. Emmy Clifton James Died, who
was sixty five years old. When the General received word,
he said he performed a very useful purpose at a
very dark time of the wool. What he did completely
fooled the Germans. Such your Churchill voice, it's no, no,
no church Hill voice is way more rip or is offensive.
That's just sort of your general British official voice. And
(17:06):
you'll notice this guy's voice changed. He's got two different
voices here. Yeah. So so the General totally co signs this,
but we have to ask ourselves. Did he completely full
the Germans? It would seem so for his part. Yeah,
But there this was one of several other operations going
(17:28):
on because again our guy who's all was, was heavy
heavily involved in this kind of campaign of deception as well.
On there was another operation, but they were happening in
tandem because both revolved around D Day, in 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. So on a
on a one to ten success scale for this body
(17:51):
double the stopple Ganger, I gotta say man attend, 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 hands? Like
that makes sense? Howie Mandel doesn't shake hands. He's a
reason notorious germophobe, right right, Yeah, he's a fist bumper
(18:11):
all day. So this is one of those rare cases
of a proven, documented, successful body double, but it's not
the only one. Will stay roughly within the same time period,
give or take a few decades, and let's travel across
(18:33):
the Iron Curtain. No, why are we going to Russia
for the next story? Why wouldn't we have both been
watching Chernobyl. I mean, it seems like an obvious place
to go, seems like a great place. It's a it's
a learning opportunity, it really is. Um No that another
famous body double, or one that we know of at least,
(18:54):
was one belonging to I guess you could say Joseph Stalin. Yeah, yeah,
Joseph Stalin, uh, one time leader of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics or USSR, and by all accounts, a
real pill, a real pill and nearing the end of
his life, especially very paranoid. I mean, it seems like
(19:17):
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 or trust but verify
that sort of the doctrine of the KGB or of
like Russian intelligence in general, so it basically means trust
no one. So there's so many strange facts about this guy.
(19:38):
First off, Uh, we still have people arguing about when
his actual birthday is. He was born Josef Vissiriyanovich Jugashvili. Uh,
and I am woefully mispronouncing that. Uh. And then when
he was thanks still thanks for that slow clap. And
then when he was in his thirties he changed his
name to Stalin because it means man of steel, got
(20:00):
a nice ring to the ball on this guy. Brass
now steel, the steel off the steel on this guy.
So during his time during the Second World War, he
of course became concerned that someone would astempt to assassinate
him and the predecessors of the KGB, the Soviet secret
police started recruiting people to be decoys more or less
(20:23):
for Stalin. So he had like a team of doubles. Yeah,
he had a gang. He had a doppel Gang. That's
good man, that's all right. Seven given an eight point five,
thank you, that's very kind. Uh So, yeah, we we
looked into this, and the thing is that he was
given these political decoys in World War Two, but it
(20:46):
is widely suspected that he kept them employed for the
rest of his life. There's also some conjecture that he
faked his own death and then 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
(21:06):
be a problem for you. Now. I don't think so either.
I think it would just be another Tuesday self sacrifice.
But I'm telling you, I'm so steeped in Chernobyl right now.
To serve what does it to serve the USSR? What
was the what was there? Was that film that came
out maybe a year ago or so, The Death of Stalin.
It's fantastic, It's great Jeffrey Tamon, isn't it? And um,
(21:27):
wait does he play He doesn't play Stalin? Um Steve
bishemmy play Kruschev 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 accents. Steve Bishemmy as
Kruschev sounds just like Steve Bishemmy as Steve Bishemmy. It's fantastic. Yes,
I recommend it so highly. It's it's the guy um
(21:49):
uh what's his name, Iannucci Um, who is the creator
of Veep and another political series. It's British polit political series.
But it's just really sharp, really funny, and really disturbing,
and it really shows this whole culture of paranoia. I
don't remember if the Doubles played into it or not.
I don't remember either. I need to rewatch it. But
(22:09):
it totally nails that Gallows humor, the paranoia. Uh and
it is based on fact. We could do an entire
episode about the weird death of Stalin now that it's
in question. Uh So, during his rise to power, he
implemented numerous murder plots against people who are citizens of
(22:30):
the Soviet Union. Anyone who opposed him would go to
a fake trial and be executed or kangaroo court, 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
(22:51):
behavior created 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 there may have been,
there may have been many more. One one is named Rashid.
(23:15):
That's even now, it's nineteen. That's all we know about
the guy. Is his like his first name. Yeah. We
also know of a man named Felix Dadyev who is
another one of one of his by doubles who we
are aware of. And here's the thing, Um, it's tough
to prove that any political leader used a body doub
(23:36):
it is it is uh because they would not have
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 plan. Yet so we didn't we don't find
out about Rashid and Felix for a long long time.
(23:58):
Rashida actually dies in at age, so the double outlived
the original. But because we know more about Felix Dadev,
maybe we can explore his story a little similar to
Ammy James, at least in my opinion, he was like
an actor trying to make it happen. Right, I'll get
(24:19):
this though, Dude, Felix Dadyev didn't even it didn't come
out officially that he had been one of I believe
at the very least four of Stalin's doubles that we
know until April until two thou So, I mean, this
is pretty new information. Uh. And I believe Daddev got permission,
(24:40):
special permission from Putin himself to be able to come
out with this information for his own purposes. We could
like write a book about it. Yeah, and he was eight,
so what we know about Russia? Though, wouldn't you think
I would have thought that Putin would have said, no, sir,
it was a different times. So um, it was a
different time. And also that kind of that kind of
(25:01):
information when it comes out is useful for them. It
becomes a situation where you want people to know it
makes thee so Dodev during the time that the Second
World War breaks out is an actor and illusionist and
a magician. Pretty cool, Pretty cool. So he was all
(25:23):
set to travel to the UK as a member of
the State Singing and Dance Band of Ukraine snappy name,
but when the war broke out, he got reassigned to
a concert brigade. So entertaining the troops certainly what we
have in the States with the us O, where you know,
to entertain the troops, keep more out up and all
of that exactly. However, in the Soviet military, if you're
(25:46):
a soldier, you're a soldier. You're a soldier, meaning that
he still had to fight and illusions, yeah, and dancing.
He had it harder than any of them. He was.
He was a triple threat that was pressed into quadruple
threat status. Yeah. And this, uh, this, you know, eventually
led to him being quite badly injured right during the
(26:07):
Russian liberation of gross Nie. Uh. His family is notified
that he has died. But here's what actually happened. In
ninety three, He's flown to a small cottage near Moscow
and the secret police tell him that he needs to
forge a new identity Stalin's body double. So they're capitalizing
(26:29):
on the fact that he's been reported as dead. Yeah, yeah,
I mean it's great. He's a ghost at this point,
so no one's going to look for a ghost 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 In is in his what
(26:49):
his mid twenties or something, and Stalin is sixty years
old looks at least, So they really have to implement
some serious like uh, you know, prosthetics and movie magic
kind of stuff to really aide this guy. And so
he watches repeated, repeated samples of Stalin's public speeches, of
(27:12):
his ambulatory habits, how he's walking, how really just the
way you hear method actors work. You know, we're like
training to be portray someone in a film. You go
through 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, any
kind of tells really really interesting. This is so wild. Okay,
(27:35):
so his his first gig is pretty intimidating. He is
tasked to stand in for Josef 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 a political decoy. And it worked.
(27:59):
It worked so well that they sent him to talk
to other international leaders, right, that's true. He went to Yalta,
UH to meet with Franklin D. Roosevelt. 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. Um. Yeah, he met
with Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to discuss the reorganization of
(28:21):
Europe after the war. And here's the thing. He had
a sort of a cross purpose here. Um. He was
meant to be a decoy that allowed the real Stalin
to land in Yalta and not be noticed. So he
was sort of like a decoy in a separate plane.
Um made made his exit and then the real Stalin was,
you know, landed elsewhere. Yeah, exactly. So he said that
(28:44):
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 have him walking around looking like Stalin
(29:08):
and knowing all these sentimate details. Because he was successful,
he was forced to sign an n d A, or
non disclosure agreement that prevented him from saying anything about
his role as Stalin's body double four decades after Stalin's
death in nine. He was also never able to tell
(29:29):
his family that he was alive. He could never tell
them when he was doing for the Soviet government. And
this was so iron clad that when Stalin died and
they never and they needed no more body doubles. Uh,
he had to create an entirely different identity for himself.
And that's how we came to know the musician Tom
(29:50):
Waits exactly. And here's the funny thing too, ben Um,
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. That's where my that's where my
mind goes. 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 nine um
(30:14):
and there's a fantastic article in 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 um
saying that Stalin Uh quote again, this is from the autography.
Quote smiled and gave me an approving nod. And that
(30:36):
was it. A man validated. You don't want to talk
to that guy. Probably not. 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 make an eye contact. If he
smiles and nods, that's it. That's you got what you
came for. You're a ghost though disappeared. Don't let him
see you again. You might change his mind. So now
(31:03):
we've upped the stakes, because 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
uh goes a little past our usual caveat we usually
try to keep things, you know, in the night. Yeah, yeah,
(31:23):
because of the gorilla. Yeah, so we that is true.
Check out our episode where we pretty much spontaneously decided
that I still feel good about it. I am totally fine.
Who's the right call in our part? So now we're
journeying to the Middle East, Iraq specifically, this is the
story of Saddam Hussein. Like Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein apparently
(31:50):
used more than one body double. Before the war. Many
people in Iraq said they could tell the real Saddam
from one of his multiple lookalikes, not by watching him
but the person pretending to be him, but by watching
his bodyguards, which were around him at all times. Yeah,
(32:12):
and Um Saddam Um was reported to have had a
veritable uh menagerie harem. I don't know what do you
call a group of employees. None of those words apply.
Doppel Gang is still the total doppel Gang. Yeah, he
really did. He had multi multiples while he ruled uh Iraq.
And this is according to U. S Intelligence. So you
(32:35):
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 with the real article, the real deal,
or you know, one of these, one of these copycats. Yeah. Yeah,
So if the bodyguards appeared a little too casual, or
(32:55):
if they appeared to laugh at jokes or something, a
lot of He'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. Another tell um from the Washington Times.
Washington Times reports an article called the Fate of Saddam's
(33:17):
Lookalikes remained unknown. Um was the fact that Saddam himself
was a big fan of close ups. Very very vain guy.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Uh this is this
is the same guy, by the way, who was a
fairly prolific author of romance novels erotic fiction. Dare we
say which like sex mysteries. Our friend Nubi would say, yes,
(33:43):
that's a that's a 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 he
loved a close up. He was a bit of a ham.
The problem is that when you have a look alike,
you need to keep it distant shadows the illusion because again,
this is one that's much more in the era of
(34:05):
constant around the clock, twenty four hour news cycle, you know, 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. No. People were so concerned
(34:28):
about this that when Saddam Hussein was captured 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 was forced to be Saddam Hussein. Well, surely,
everbody's don't we know about these doubles? They wouldn't have
(34:50):
been so hapless, right, It would have been almost a
privilege for many. It seems to be like Felix Dodev
strikes me as 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
(35:10):
testing because it meant, you know, some of these body
doubles probably spent decades at this point mirroring the real
deal totally. And I do want to back down my
previous statement. A lot of these folks were in fact
forced to do this. There's a film called The Devil's
Double that came out in two thousand and eleven that
kind of looks at the Saddam Hussein regime through the
(35:30):
eyes of a double that was meant for his son Udai,
who was a real piece of work himself in his
own big time and this man was forced to do this. Yeah, yeah,
I think I've seen that film. So Rumsfeld, you know,
he's so paranoid about this that he demands they collect
(35:52):
d n A and he accepted it finally as nine
nine points something percent proof positive that this was the
genuine Saddam Hussein. And he also emphasized, he said, look,
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 um dedicated
(36:18):
to this job that they had undergone plastic surgery and
they could have even had things like tattoos, bullet holes,
or moles that would make them appear to look even
more like the leader. And as I think it's really
interesting that you mentioned Udey, who's saying that's his oldest son, right,
(36:40):
so his body double the guy in real life named
Latifiyah Hea. Why a h I a slieve? Yeah, they
went to school, right and then uh, he, like all
the Rockey citizens at the time, had mandatory military service.
It's part of growing up. So at night he is
(37:01):
enlisted non consensually to be U Day's body double. And
then he said it was pretty He said Day was
a psychopath. Yeah. 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's Um, the
team lost and he personally was dragged um across the
(37:24):
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 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 they would be sand in the wounds on the
really really really psychotic grizzly stuff. They even made them
(37:45):
climb a ladder and jump into a vat of raw
sewage with these open wounds. Uh. And it was the
idea that, like they would, they would do that to
them until they won. It seems like really good motivation there.
Let's talk a little bit about Uday Hussein uh fighting
for the Guardian Suzanne Goldenberg. Uh, looks into this guy's
(38:05):
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 is a real Geoffrey Lanister type figure.
Totally yeah on that. So he when he was overseeing
(38:28):
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. Uh. He was a notorious sexual predator. Uh.
He would order any girl or woman who caught his
eye to be brought to his private pleasure doom. Uh.
(38:51):
So this was this was a place with it was
on his father's estate withindoor 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
banks of the Tigress. He shot one of his uncle's
in the leg in he bludgeoned his father's bodyguard to
(39:16):
death in front of people at a party. Yeah, it
was just worse and worse and worse. So I would
hate to be his body double. Absolutely, I almost would rather.
I don't know, it's tough to say. I kind of
want to see the film. I have not seen it.
I've just read it a little bit about it. Uh
so I understand that it's pretty visceral and a lot
of this stuff is dealt with um and this person
(39:38):
is basically like living in fear of his own life.
Not to mention the fact that he is being a
body double for a man who is universally despised, probably
people cunning for him all the time. Great point to
people know that he's not the real U Day because
he's not killing people at parties. That's a very dubious distinction. Yeah,
so eventually you Day passes away in July of two
(40:00):
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 his father's government. UM.
So our thoughts go out to anybody, especially to Latifa,
(40:20):
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, because you know,
we're to Hussain's deep at this point. But there are many,
many more alleged body doubles. Right. A guy named Joe R. Reader,
(40:43):
who served as Under secretary for the U. S Army UM,
gave an interview with Fox News and oh one where
he kind of intimated that there were some others that
he knew of. He said, Osama bin Lad and likely having,
which makes a lot of sense being that he was
so um doggedly being hunted by the US military. Uh,
and also Manuel Noriega um are what are some other ones? Ben? Well,
(41:07):
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 in yester years. Yes, yeah, I
have the jacket for it in the hat. It's mainly
what it is. Guy used a really nice square beard
and a cigar, and I can grow I can grow
beards pretty quickly, nice, offensively. Superpower, dude, it's very inconvenient
(41:31):
superpower because I'm a guy who likes to drink milkshakes
and eat soup and I just can't. Okay, I have
a minstre respect for you, man. You have a great beard.
I don't know if you guys know this about my
co host here, but uh, he has a he has
a fantastic and well coifed beard because of beard blindness.
From the top of the show, remember, yeah, but we
need to we need to thanks for big up in
(41:53):
my beer. Um. Here's some other ones that aren't body doubles.
Winston Churchill was reported and you could have been this guy, Ben. Honestly,
you could do such a good, such a good impersonation. Yeah.
He used a voice impersonator, UM, a man named Norman
Shelley to 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
(42:14):
those morning breakfast chats every day, so someone else he
was probably tanked, right, yeah, hungover exactly. That makes perfect sense.
Then an aid to Henry Kissing jer has been on
record saying that, um, when kissing your went to China
on a secret mission to China's have any one he
used an impersonator at least one time? So is this okay?
(42:34):
Here's my question is we had earlier talked about what
a what a rich person's toy a blimp must be. Like,
you vote a blimp, then you're blimp Ridge. You're you're
blimp Ridge. You're frivolously, possibly offensively wealthy. Blimp Ridge is
a funny thing to say. It sounds like its own word.
It sounds somehow like a cursework. It does. But but
(42:58):
I love it. So I'm 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.
I'm supposed to take the blimp out to the Builderberg conference,
but I I believe I'll send my body double. Here's
the thing, though, it only matters if it has to
be you, right, Otherwise, it's just called a servant or
(43:21):
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 face time that either you don't feel
like doing or that could actually put you in danger.
And there have been many other body doubles or alleged
body doubles throughout history. There there was even a Mexican politician,
(43:46):
Renato Trunco Gomez, who held a national competition in twenty
fifteen to try to find the best candidates to be
his body doubles, which might defeat the purpose. And I
think in China this may still be going on. Wealthy
people who are sentenced to serve time in prisoner jail, Uh,
(44:09):
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
go to jail for you. Must I don't want anyone
to go to jail. I hope no one. You're a
good person, Ben, you got a kind heart. That's very
that's a that's very kind of you to say. Uh,
(44:31):
and this is our episode. Look, no I have to
ask you know, you don't have to. I I feel
compelled to ask. Do you do you have any body
double observations or double ganger observations with which you agreed?
Did someone ever say something like, hey, you know you
you kind of look like or sound like. It doesn't
have to be faced, you also maybe sound like this
(44:53):
person you agreed in staid it wasn't just the beard,
you know, it comes up a lot. It's really weird.
I've heard that multiple times from listeners and again they
say that I sound like Dwight from the Office. I've
heard this. 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. Great, that's what
I hear. I hear great things. Um, so maybe maybe
(45:16):
I can make a call on that when I'm more
familiar with it. But yeah, we have received several emails
regarding that. Now that's not Dow I'm doing. I'm doing
job from Arrested Development. Oh yeah, I don't even know who.
Still reminds me very I'm gonna say. I know it's
his favorite thing. Um may be aware. We're all kind
of a big family here. How stuff works. Uh. One
(45:37):
of our producers, brilliant guy friend of the show and
personal friend of mine named Chandler Maze, always freaks me
up by how much he resembles the actor who plays
Job and arrested Development. He does a little bit that's
not so much in the face. It's the swag, it's
the man or is it? It's the love of illusions?
Very true. It's a very big, big, big sweeping hand movements. Um.
(46:00):
I agree with that. Well, this has better episode, and
I think it was a pretty good one. I don't
know if I do say so myself. Yes, yeah, I
want to get too big here. I want to get
too big league. Yeah. When Um, I have a meeting
with the other Ben Bowling later this weekend, and I
think he'll be he'll be really glad to know that
this went well. Uh. In the meantime, we'd like to
(46:22):
hear from you. Do you ever get a let's all
be nice to each other on the internet? Do you
ever get uh repeated comparisons 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?
(46:43):
You know, I had a long time, so I had
a very difficult time differentiating for years Natalie Portman and um, Paul,
what's again, Cura Nightly? Yeah, I can see that it
looks similar. Yeah, well that's on me. Maybe I have
face bland. Remember the show The Adventures of Pete and
Pete familiar with it? Huge fan? Um there is a
character on it called Endless Mike who was kind of
(47:04):
a bully, and for the longest time I thought that
was young Sam Rockwell, I remember you mentioned this earlier,
and some friends of some friends of ours who are
also big fans of the show thought the same thing. Well,
maybe you're onto something. Uh, let us know. Let us
know your favorite doppelganger look alike our Body Double Stories.
You can find us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. For Facebook,
(47:25):
we highly recommend checking out our favorite part of the show,
your fellow listeners on our page or Ridiculous Historians. Yeah,
and if you want to find me individually on Instagram,
you can look me up at how Now. Noel Brown
and if you want to find me on Instagram and
believe most recently I was looking into the problematic past
(47:45):
of Belgian comic strips at the Belgian Comic Strip Museum.
That instagram is at ben Bowling. And if you don't
want to do any of that stuff, you can just
send us an email. We do have one. It is
ridiculous at iHeart radio dot com. And of course, as always,
thanks to our super producer Paul standing in for producer
Casey pegram a Bush like a Champ. Thanks to Alex
Williams who can post our theme. Thanks to Gabe Lucier
(48:07):
who helped us put this episode together search wise. Yeah,
thanks to Christopher Hasciotis. Because we just liked we just
like to thank him in general. Jonathan Strickland, the Quister
can go right to hell. Thanks shot at the Stricklin
Take the Quister. Thanks so much to you for listening,
and Nol, thank you for being you. You know, if
(48:27):
you are a body double right now, I will say
that you're doing a top notch job. I do. I
take my work very seriously. See letter Folks. For more
(48:55):
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio
app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
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 uh.
It's also often said that everyone on the planet statistically
has a doppelganger, A dope. Who's your doppel ben I
(00:50):
don't know, no, I could. I get a lot of references,
many of which are completely whoosh 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 get a lot of like looks of recognition that
you then have to process and realize, like, Okay, way
is this real or is this someone imagining that I
am someone to they think I might be, but I'm
(01:12):
actually not. 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 us specific
maybe a facial feature like a beard, for instance, that
happened to you, right, man? Do you know how many
people with beards I get compared to. And the thing
(01:34):
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 quoft face Maine, you know,
like me, and then we're the same person. I Uh,
this is I call it beard blindness. If that's great beards,
that's great, man, that's that feels like a real thing.
Uh grief anecdote for me, just how tricky it can be. UM,
(01:57):
I had UH long time ago, there was this UH
store I used to go to, uh, this Asian grocery
store called UH First Oriental. You know, it's down the
street from the Farmer's Market into cab and 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
(02:21):
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 me and
that guy have in common is is maybe one or
two mutual friends, and the fact that we both have
(02:42):
brown hair and maybe our genetically similar well you're both
smolderingly good looking. That's so kind man, thank you, And
just to just to to have to back you up here,
Ben's not humble bragging there. Bradley Cooper is in fact
the closest best personal friend of our boss ConL Burn's true.
We can mention that on it. Let's come, okay, yes,
yeah he is. Uh, he is with us, uh, defending
(03:05):
the show against the tyranny of Cheryl Crowe. Do you
think Bradley Cooper has a body double then, just you know,
for walking around times, I don't know. Definitely for a
shopping for him, Definitely for um characters and rules he
plays As an actor, A lot of actors have body
doubles for stunts or for intimate romantic scenes so they
(03:25):
don't have to look the same in the face. They
mainly just have to be able to look the same
in profile or like from behind or like from a
long shot right like when you see photographs of stunt
doubles next to their actors, Uh you it's it's kind
of an uncanny Valley thing and occasionally it's a I'll
say it. Occasionally it's a real life version of that.
(03:47):
We have Blanke at home, meme, do you know what
I'm talking about? It's uh, I'll send you something. Okay,
I'll send you something. For now we know, uh, we
know that you are the real Null Brown. I am
the real Ben Boland. So far as we know, there
are no body doubles involved here. I refused to stand
up those sir, all right, and uh, and we know
(04:08):
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, not
(04:30):
someone who vaguely looks like some other person with brown hair.
Not the way Casey Pegram, super producer Casey Pegram has
a secret life in France as some sort of criminal
mastermind known as Yes, that's a that's an alternate identity, right,
the same thing as a body double. Right, He's one
guy with two identities that we know of. A body
(04:51):
double would be two separate real people who share at
least publicly a single identity. And specifically today we're talking
about political body double, which, as it turns out, are
pretty rare. This is a pretty shortlistical episode, but all
of them are nice and beefy. A lot of good
info out there, but the ones that we do know of, Yeah,
we brought the juice and we wanted to be sure
(05:11):
that we didn't get lost in some quagmire speculation. Real
quick to set this up. You know why they're increasingly rare, right,
you know, 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. That's say,
(05:31):
I am, you know, the arch Duke of Hammington's Sandwich,
which is maybe I'm paraphrasing, you must be um, Yeah, no,
it's 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 Commodore's, a very influential famous UM band
(05:53):
from that era, had a body double version of the
band that would tour simultaneously. They could literally have two
versions of the show on the road at the same time.
That's crazy, dude. This that reminds me of Morgan Freeman's
voice double. We talked about this before. I think, right,
maybe not on Arrow. Maybe we're just hanging out. So
(06:13):
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 or a cause or whatever whatever. And apparently
the story goes, I love if someone can confirm this.
The story goes that he has two different kind of
(06:36):
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.
Can't get the real mf you can go for the
next best thing. I'm not trying to dog on voice
(06:56):
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 kind of sub in for you can
get the bargain basement price. I don't know how I
(07:17):
feel about that. Morgan Freeman, capitalism, baby roll the dice. Yeah,
it's 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 walkin
Al Pacino, I'll say it. Keanu Reeves, who seems like
(07:38):
a tremendous guy. Do so they have stunt doubles, but
that's different, as you said, no getting to the point
of our show. We do have a point today. Uh,
there are political body doubles. They are much less common,
perhaps than fiction would have led us to believe. So
we'd like to go through a few of these and
(08:00):
uh and get your take along the way. The first
one was it 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
(08:21):
he have a body double right. He's a general. That's
a big deal. So maybe it's military related. Yeah, well
that's true. So UM must call him Monty because we're friends,
were familiar. Monty was UM 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,
(08:41):
the big one. So UM they found it. They as
an m I five, found it to be a high
priority to make sure that this guy was protected in
every sense of the word. Ah. Yes, because this is
deep in the propaganda front of the war. Both the
Allied and Axis forces are trying to um to trick
(09:05):
one another with the publication of fake plans. They're trying
to lay some red herrings and mislead their opponents. So,
as you said, no m I five, m I five says,
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
(09:27):
one man. And that's when they run into a man
named M. E. Clifton James. Emmy Clifton James is not
a general, he's not even British. Is an Australian actor. Yes,
and so m I five approaches him and they say, okay,
we need you to do us a solid. We have
a special mission for you. You are going to dress
(09:49):
like General Montgomery, you are going to act like General Montgomery,
and you are going to travel around Northern Africa right
publicly talking about Allied plans uh 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
(10:11):
saying total fake malarkey plans. Just just be like, you know,
uh how actually putting all of our forces in Lithuania.
This reminds me of the story we did about Pugel Leah,
the operative for the British Intelligence agency who planted fake
stories with the Germans. Yes, yeah, just so very very
(10:32):
similar tactic. We had some of you write it's a
very nice thing on Instagram about that too recently. Right,
it's pretty cool these posts like cool history pictures and yeah,
that's a good idea. Shout out to history with Astro
A s t r O who said that they really
enjoyed our our account of Agent Garbo, which which was
(10:54):
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 astro uh takes, you know,
little vignettes, for sure. 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 um here. James had
(11:15):
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 as
long as he did have to type something right exactly.
And James actually wrote an autobiography called I Was Montese
Double Um where he said that the Nazis were so
um completely taken with his subterfuge, with with his intimitation,
(11:40):
that they actually were considering assassinating him. 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
(12:01):
their troops to southern France because that's where they thought
the evasion would be based rather than normandy, So this worked.
We It's it's kind of tough to say how much
of a sway his his actions his secret mission had
on German forces, but they definitely did play a part. Now,
(12:21):
this con this, uh, this duplicity was pretty complicated because
the best way to tell convincing falsehood is to make
it very very closely related to the truth. It has
to have a very similitude, right, and this meant that
James had to be a full on method actor sometimes
in ways he did not appreciate. M I five told
(12:43):
him that he could not drink booze and he could
not smoke tobacco because Montgomery didn't do that. 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
(13:05):
eat pork, and he he had kind of a spartan diet,
so he wouldn't use milk or sugar as porridge. So
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. Indeed went
folio on that business. Um. So this whole operation um
(13:26):
was referred to as copper Head and it was conceived
in January when Brigadier Dudley Clark saw a movie that
inspired him, a movie called Five Graves to Cairo. Right right,
this this actor Miles Mander h Dudley Clark sees him
playing a British officer and he thinks, well, heck, that
(13:48):
guy looks a lot like General Montgomery. And 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.
But then they meet a huge snag. They arrange a
meeting with Miles Mander in person, and then they say,
(14:11):
oh no, way too tall, way too tall. General Montgomery,
you see, is a bit bantam. He has five ft
six bantom. You say, what does that mean? Technically it
means kind of a small chicken, but it's also a
weight class in boxing, bantam weight. And it also uses
its slangily used to refer to people of diminutive stature
(14:32):
with combative disposition. Vocabulary corner with that and all bantam bantom,
I love that word. So yeah, dudes, a little shorty's
a little prince like. Sure. Yeah. So so they say, okay,
that's not gonna work. Everyone will clock that immediately if
they meet him in person, and a true body double
(14:52):
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 coupe. Until that is a guy named Stephen Watts
who's in My five Officer. Happens across a photo of
a British Army lieutenant named Emmy Clifton James who was
(15:14):
dressed as the General for a stage show. Weird, weird,
so many weird little happenstancey things that happened here. Uh.
And this guy was sort of a lesser known Australian actor,
sort of a Toast of London type character. Uh. He
was forty six, so he was you know, it wasn't
happening for him, but he he had been in this
production and they He then was assigned to the Royal
(15:36):
Army pay Corps and was based in Leicster, not Leicester
like you think it would be pronounced when you look
at it on paper. It's a tricky one. It's really
but it's like Worster in Massachusetts. But it's almost like,
I think I'm still gonna get yelled at even because
I said it wrong, even though I said it right.
I said that I wanted to say it wrong, and
that's just as bad as saying it wrong. Man, lean
into it, all right. It's a living language. So Leicester
(15:58):
is where he's based, working for the Army, Royal Army
pay Corps, and he kind of did little side gigs
as as an actor on the side, you know, when
he wasn't when he had free time. Um that Watts
and Clark made this happen. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Stephen
Watts and Dudley Clark put this operation Copperhead into motion
(16:20):
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 gum, he did it and pulled it off successfully.
This was this was admitted by General Montgomery himself on
(16:42):
May eighth, nine six three. Emmy Clifton James Died, who
was sixty five years old. When the General received word,
he said he performed a very useful purpose at a
very dark time of the wool. What he did completely
fooled the Germans. Such your Churchill voice, it's no, no,
no church Hill voice is way more rip or is offensive.
That's just sort of your general British official voice. And
(17:06):
you'll notice this guy's voice changed. He's got two different
voices here. Yeah. So so the General totally co signs this,
but we have to ask ourselves. Did he completely full
the Germans? It would seem so for his part. Yeah,
But there this was one of several other operations going
(17:28):
on because again our guy who's all was, was heavy
heavily involved in this kind of campaign of deception as well.
On there was another operation, but they were happening in
tandem because both revolved around D Day, in 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. So on a
on a one to ten success scale for this body
(17:51):
double the stopple Ganger, I gotta say man attend, 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 hands? Like
that makes sense? Howie Mandel doesn't shake hands. He's a
reason notorious germophobe, right right, Yeah, he's a fist bumper
(18:11):
all day. So this is one of those rare cases
of a proven, documented, successful body double, but it's not
the only one. Will stay roughly within the same time period,
give or take a few decades, and let's travel across
(18:33):
the Iron Curtain. No, why are we going to Russia
for the next story? Why wouldn't we have both been
watching Chernobyl. I mean, it seems like an obvious place
to go, seems like a great place. It's a it's
a learning opportunity, it really is. Um No that another
famous body double, or one that we know of at least,
(18:54):
was one belonging to I guess you could say Joseph Stalin. Yeah, yeah,
Joseph Stalin, uh, one time leader of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics or USSR, and by all accounts, a
real pill, a real pill and nearing the end of
his life, especially very paranoid. I mean, it seems like
(19:17):
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 or trust but verify
that sort of the doctrine of the KGB or of
like Russian intelligence in general, so it basically means trust
no one. So there's so many strange facts about this guy.
(19:38):
First off, Uh, we still have people arguing about when
his actual birthday is. He was born Josef Vissiriyanovich Jugashvili. Uh,
and I am woefully mispronouncing that. Uh. And then when
he was thanks still thanks for that slow clap. And
then when he was in his thirties he changed his
name to Stalin because it means man of steel, got
(20:00):
a nice ring to the ball on this guy. Brass
now steel, the steel off the steel on this guy.
So during his time during the Second World War, he
of course became concerned that someone would astempt to assassinate
him and the predecessors of the KGB, the Soviet secret
police started recruiting people to be decoys more or less
(20:23):
for Stalin. So he had like a team of doubles. Yeah,
he had a gang. He had a doppel Gang. That's
good man, that's all right. Seven given an eight point five,
thank you, that's very kind. Uh So, yeah, we we
looked into this, and the thing is that he was
given these political decoys in World War Two, but it
(20:46):
is widely suspected that he kept them employed for the
rest of his life. There's also some conjecture that he
faked his own death and then 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
(21:06):
be a problem for you. Now. I don't think so either.
I think it would just be another Tuesday self sacrifice.
But I'm telling you, I'm so steeped in Chernobyl right now.
To serve what does it to serve the USSR? What
was the what was there? Was that film that came
out maybe a year ago or so, The Death of Stalin.
It's fantastic, It's great Jeffrey Tamon, isn't it? And um,
(21:27):
wait does he play He doesn't play Stalin? Um Steve
bishemmy play Kruschev 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 accents. Steve Bishemmy as
Kruschev sounds just like Steve Bishemmy as Steve Bishemmy. It's fantastic. Yes,
I recommend it so highly. It's it's the guy um
(21:49):
uh what's his name, Iannucci Um, who is the creator
of Veep and another political series. It's British polit political series.
But it's just really sharp, really funny, and really disturbing,
and it really shows this whole culture of paranoia. I
don't remember if the Doubles played into it or not.
I don't remember either. I need to rewatch it. But
(22:09):
it totally nails that Gallows humor, the paranoia. Uh and
it is based on fact. We could do an entire
episode about the weird death of Stalin now that it's
in question. Uh So, during his rise to power, he
implemented numerous murder plots against people who are citizens of
(22:30):
the Soviet Union. Anyone who opposed him would go to
a fake trial and be executed or kangaroo court, 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
(22:51):
behavior created 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 there may have been,
there may have been many more. One one is named Rashid.
(23:15):
That's even now, it's nineteen. That's all we know about
the guy. Is his like his first name. Yeah. We
also know of a man named Felix Dadyev who is
another one of one of his by doubles who we
are aware of. And here's the thing, Um, it's tough
to prove that any political leader used a body doub
(23:36):
it is it is uh because they would not have
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 plan. Yet so we didn't we don't find
out about Rashid and Felix for a long long time.
(23:58):
Rashida actually dies in at age, so the double outlived
the original. But because we know more about Felix Dadev,
maybe we can explore his story a little similar to
Ammy James, at least in my opinion, he was like
an actor trying to make it happen. Right, I'll get
(24:19):
this though, Dude, Felix Dadyev didn't even it didn't come
out officially that he had been one of I believe
at the very least four of Stalin's doubles that we
know until April until two thou So, I mean, this
is pretty new information. Uh. And I believe Daddev got permission,
(24:40):
special permission from Putin himself to be able to come
out with this information for his own purposes. We could
like write a book about it. Yeah, and he was eight,
so what we know about Russia? Though, wouldn't you think
I would have thought that Putin would have said, no, sir,
it was a different times. So um, it was a
different time. And also that kind of that kind of
(25:01):
information when it comes out is useful for them. It
becomes a situation where you want people to know it
makes thee so Dodev during the time that the Second
World War breaks out is an actor and illusionist and
a magician. Pretty cool, Pretty cool. So he was all
(25:23):
set to travel to the UK as a member of
the State Singing and Dance Band of Ukraine snappy name,
but when the war broke out, he got reassigned to
a concert brigade. So entertaining the troops certainly what we
have in the States with the us O, where you know,
to entertain the troops, keep more out up and all
of that exactly. However, in the Soviet military, if you're
(25:46):
a soldier, you're a soldier. You're a soldier, meaning that
he still had to fight and illusions, yeah, and dancing.
He had it harder than any of them. He was.
He was a triple threat that was pressed into quadruple
threat status. Yeah. And this, uh, this, you know, eventually
led to him being quite badly injured right during the
(26:07):
Russian liberation of gross Nie. Uh. His family is notified
that he has died. But here's what actually happened. In
ninety three, He's flown to a small cottage near Moscow
and the secret police tell him that he needs to
forge a new identity Stalin's body double. So they're capitalizing
(26:29):
on the fact that he's been reported as dead. Yeah, yeah,
I mean it's great. He's a ghost at this point,
so no one's going to look for a ghost 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 In is in his what
(26:49):
his mid twenties or something, and Stalin is sixty years
old looks at least, So they really have to implement
some serious like uh, you know, prosthetics and movie magic
kind of stuff to really aide this guy. And so
he watches repeated, repeated samples of Stalin's public speeches, of
(27:12):
his ambulatory habits, how he's walking, how really just the
way you hear method actors work. You know, we're like
training to be portray someone in a film. You go
through 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, any
kind of tells really really interesting. This is so wild. Okay,
(27:35):
so his his first gig is pretty intimidating. He is
tasked to stand in for Josef 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 a political decoy. And it worked.
(27:59):
It worked so well that they sent him to talk
to other international leaders, right, that's true. He went to Yalta,
UH to meet with Franklin D. Roosevelt. 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. Um. Yeah, he met
with Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to discuss the reorganization of
(28:21):
Europe after the war. And here's the thing. He had
a sort of a cross purpose here. Um. He was
meant to be a decoy that allowed the real Stalin
to land in Yalta and not be noticed. So he
was sort of like a decoy in a separate plane.
Um made made his exit and then the real Stalin was,
you know, landed elsewhere. Yeah, exactly. So he said that
(28:44):
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 have him walking around looking like Stalin
(29:08):
and knowing all these sentimate details. Because he was successful,
he was forced to sign an n d A, or
non disclosure agreement that prevented him from saying anything about
his role as Stalin's body double four decades after Stalin's
death in nine. He was also never able to tell
(29:29):
his family that he was alive. He could never tell
them when he was doing for the Soviet government. And
this was so iron clad that when Stalin died and
they never and they needed no more body doubles. Uh,
he had to create an entirely different identity for himself.
And that's how we came to know the musician Tom
(29:50):
Waits exactly. And here's the funny thing too, ben Um,
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. That's where my that's where my
mind goes. 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 nine um
(30:14):
and there's a fantastic article in 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 um
saying that Stalin Uh quote again, this is from the autography.
Quote smiled and gave me an approving nod. And that
(30:36):
was it. A man validated. You don't want to talk
to that guy. Probably not. 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 make an eye contact. If he
smiles and nods, that's it. That's you got what you
came for. You're a ghost though disappeared. Don't let him
see you again. You might change his mind. So now
(31:03):
we've upped the stakes, because 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
uh goes a little past our usual caveat we usually
try to keep things, you know, in the night. Yeah, yeah,
(31:23):
because of the gorilla. Yeah, so we that is true.
Check out our episode where we pretty much spontaneously decided
that I still feel good about it. I am totally fine.
Who's the right call in our part? So now we're
journeying to the Middle East, Iraq specifically, this is the
story of Saddam Hussein. Like Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein apparently
(31:50):
used more than one body double. Before the war. Many
people in Iraq said they could tell the real Saddam
from one of his multiple lookalikes, not by watching him
but the person pretending to be him, but by watching
his bodyguards, which were around him at all times. Yeah,
(32:12):
and Um Saddam Um was reported to have had a
veritable uh menagerie harem. I don't know what do you
call a group of employees. None of those words apply.
Doppel Gang is still the total doppel Gang. Yeah, he
really did. He had multi multiples while he ruled uh Iraq.
And this is according to U. S Intelligence. So you
(32:35):
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 with the real article, the real deal,
or you know, one of these, one of these copycats. Yeah. Yeah,
So if the bodyguards appeared a little too casual, or
(32:55):
if they appeared to laugh at jokes or something, a
lot of He'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. Another tell um from the Washington Times.
Washington Times reports an article called the Fate of Saddam's
(33:17):
Lookalikes remained unknown. Um was the fact that Saddam himself
was a big fan of close ups. Very very vain guy.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Uh this is this
is the same guy, by the way, who was a
fairly prolific author of romance novels erotic fiction. Dare we
say which like sex mysteries. Our friend Nubi would say, yes,
(33:43):
that's a that's a 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 he
loved a close up. He was a bit of a ham.
The problem is that when you have a look alike,
you need to keep it distant shadows the illusion because again,
this is one that's much more in the era of
(34:05):
constant around the clock, twenty four hour news cycle, you know, 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. No. People were so concerned
(34:28):
about this that when Saddam Hussein was captured 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 was forced to be Saddam Hussein. Well, surely,
everbody's don't we know about these doubles? They wouldn't have
(34:50):
been so hapless, right, It would have been almost a
privilege for many. It seems to be like Felix Dodev
strikes me as 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
(35:10):
testing because it meant, you know, some of these body
doubles probably spent decades at this point mirroring the real
deal totally. And I do want to back down my
previous statement. A lot of these folks were in fact
forced to do this. There's a film called The Devil's
Double that came out in two thousand and eleven that
kind of looks at the Saddam Hussein regime through the
(35:30):
eyes of a double that was meant for his son Udai,
who was a real piece of work himself in his
own big time and this man was forced to do this. Yeah, yeah,
I think I've seen that film. So Rumsfeld, you know,
he's so paranoid about this that he demands they collect
(35:52):
d n A and he accepted it finally as nine
nine points something percent proof positive that this was the
genuine Saddam Hussein. And he also emphasized, he said, look,
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 um dedicated
(36:18):
to this job that they had undergone plastic surgery and
they could have even had things like tattoos, bullet holes,
or moles that would make them appear to look even
more like the leader. And as I think it's really
interesting that you mentioned Udey, who's saying that's his oldest son, right,
(36:40):
so his body double the guy in real life named
Latifiyah Hea. Why a h I a slieve? Yeah, they
went to school, right and then uh, he, like all
the Rockey citizens at the time, had mandatory military service.
It's part of growing up. So at night he is
(37:01):
enlisted non consensually to be U Day's body double. And
then he said it was pretty He said Day was
a psychopath. Yeah. 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's Um, the
team lost and he personally was dragged um across the
(37:24):
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 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 they would be sand in the wounds on the
really really really psychotic grizzly stuff. They even made them
(37:45):
climb a ladder and jump into a vat of raw
sewage with these open wounds. Uh. And it was the
idea that, like they would, they would do that to
them until they won. It seems like really good motivation there.
Let's talk a little bit about Uday Hussein uh fighting
for the Guardian Suzanne Goldenberg. Uh, looks into this guy's
(38:05):
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 is a real Geoffrey Lanister type figure.
Totally yeah on that. So he when he was overseeing
(38:28):
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. Uh. He was a notorious sexual predator. Uh.
He would order any girl or woman who caught his
eye to be brought to his private pleasure doom. Uh.
(38:51):
So this was this was a place with it was
on his father's estate withindoor 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
banks of the Tigress. He shot one of his uncle's
in the leg in he bludgeoned his father's bodyguard to
(39:16):
death in front of people at a party. Yeah, it
was just worse and worse and worse. So I would
hate to be his body double. Absolutely, I almost would rather.
I don't know, it's tough to say. I kind of
want to see the film. I have not seen it.
I've just read it a little bit about it. Uh
so I understand that it's pretty visceral and a lot
of this stuff is dealt with um and this person
(39:38):
is basically like living in fear of his own life.
Not to mention the fact that he is being a
body double for a man who is universally despised, probably
people cunning for him all the time. Great point to
people know that he's not the real U Day because
he's not killing people at parties. That's a very dubious distinction. Yeah,
so eventually you Day passes away in July of two
(40:00):
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 his father's government. UM.
So our thoughts go out to anybody, especially to Latifa,
(40:20):
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, because you know,
we're to Hussain's deep at this point. But there are many,
many more alleged body doubles. Right. A guy named Joe R. Reader,
(40:43):
who served as Under secretary for the U. S Army UM,
gave an interview with Fox News and oh one where
he kind of intimated that there were some others that
he knew of. He said, Osama bin Lad and likely having,
which makes a lot of sense being that he was
so um doggedly being hunted by the US military. Uh,
and also Manuel Noriega um are what are some other ones? Ben? Well,
(41:07):
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 in yester years. Yes, yeah, I
have the jacket for it in the hat. It's mainly
what it is. Guy used a really nice square beard
and a cigar, and I can grow I can grow
beards pretty quickly, nice, offensively. Superpower, dude, it's very inconvenient
(41:31):
superpower because I'm a guy who likes to drink milkshakes
and eat soup and I just can't. Okay, I have
a minstre respect for you, man. You have a great beard.
I don't know if you guys know this about my
co host here, but uh, he has a he has
a fantastic and well coifed beard because of beard blindness.
From the top of the show, remember, yeah, but we
need to we need to thanks for big up in
(41:53):
my beer. Um. Here's some other ones that aren't body doubles.
Winston Churchill was reported and you could have been this guy, Ben. Honestly,
you could do such a good, such a good impersonation. Yeah.
He used a voice impersonator, UM, a man named Norman
Shelley to 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
(42:14):
those morning breakfast chats every day, so someone else he
was probably tanked, right, yeah, hungover exactly. That makes perfect sense.
Then an aid to Henry Kissing jer has been on
record saying that, um, when kissing your went to China
on a secret mission to China's have any one he
used an impersonator at least one time? So is this okay?
(42:34):
Here's my question is we had earlier talked about what
a what a rich person's toy a blimp must be. Like,
you vote a blimp, then you're blimp Ridge. You're you're
blimp Ridge. You're frivolously, possibly offensively wealthy. Blimp Ridge is
a funny thing to say. It sounds like its own word.
It sounds somehow like a cursework. It does. But but
(42:58):
I love it. So I'm 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.
I'm supposed to take the blimp out to the Builderberg conference,
but I I believe I'll send my body double. Here's
the thing, though, it only matters if it has to
be you, right, Otherwise, it's just called a servant or
(43:21):
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 face time that either you don't feel
like doing or that could actually put you in danger.
And there have been many other body doubles or alleged
body doubles throughout history. There there was even a Mexican politician,
(43:46):
Renato Trunco Gomez, who held a national competition in twenty
fifteen to try to find the best candidates to be
his body doubles, which might defeat the purpose. And I
think in China this may still be going on. Wealthy
people who are sentenced to serve time in prisoner jail, Uh,
(44:09):
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
go to jail for you. Must I don't want anyone
to go to jail. I hope no one. You're a
good person, Ben, you got a kind heart. That's very
that's a that's very kind of you to say. Uh,
(44:31):
and this is our episode. Look, no I have to
ask you know, you don't have to. I I feel
compelled to ask. Do you do you have any body
double observations or double ganger observations with which you agreed?
Did someone ever say something like, hey, you know you
you kind of look like or sound like. It doesn't
have to be faced, you also maybe sound like this
(44:53):
person you agreed in staid it wasn't just the beard,
you know, it comes up a lot. It's really weird.
I've heard that multiple times from listeners and again they
say that I sound like Dwight from the Office. I've
heard this. 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. Great, that's what
I hear. I hear great things. Um, so maybe maybe
(45:16):
I can make a call on that when I'm more
familiar with it. But yeah, we have received several emails
regarding that. Now that's not Dow I'm doing. I'm doing
job from Arrested Development. Oh yeah, I don't even know who.
Still reminds me very I'm gonna say. I know it's
his favorite thing. Um may be aware. We're all kind
of a big family here. How stuff works. Uh. One
(45:37):
of our producers, brilliant guy friend of the show and
personal friend of mine named Chandler Maze, always freaks me
up by how much he resembles the actor who plays
Job and arrested Development. He does a little bit that's
not so much in the face. It's the swag, it's
the man or is it? It's the love of illusions?
Very true. It's a very big, big, big sweeping hand movements. Um.
(46:00):
I agree with that. Well, this has better episode, and
I think it was a pretty good one. I don't
know if I do say so myself. Yes, yeah, I
want to get too big here. I want to get
too big league. Yeah. When Um, I have a meeting
with the other Ben Bowling later this weekend, and I
think he'll be he'll be really glad to know that
this went well. Uh. In the meantime, we'd like to
(46:22):
hear from you. Do you ever get a let's all
be nice to each other on the internet? Do you
ever get uh repeated comparisons 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?
(46:43):
You know, I had a long time, so I had
a very difficult time differentiating for years Natalie Portman and um, Paul,
what's again, Cura Nightly? Yeah, I can see that it
looks similar. Yeah, well that's on me. Maybe I have
face bland. Remember the show The Adventures of Pete and
Pete familiar with it? Huge fan? Um there is a
character on it called Endless Mike who was kind of
(47:04):
a bully, and for the longest time I thought that
was young Sam Rockwell, I remember you mentioned this earlier,
and some friends of some friends of ours who are
also big fans of the show thought the same thing. Well,
maybe you're onto something. Uh, let us know. Let us
know your favorite doppelganger look alike our Body Double Stories.
You can find us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. For Facebook,
(47:25):
we highly recommend checking out our favorite part of the show,
your fellow listeners on our page or Ridiculous Historians. Yeah,
and if you want to find me individually on Instagram,
you can look me up at how Now. Noel Brown
and if you want to find me on Instagram and
believe most recently I was looking into the problematic past
(47:45):
of Belgian comic strips at the Belgian Comic Strip Museum.
That instagram is at ben Bowling. And if you don't
want to do any of that stuff, you can just
send us an email. We do have one. It is
ridiculous at iHeart radio dot com. And of course, as always,
thanks to our super producer Paul standing in for producer
Casey pegram a Bush like a Champ. Thanks to Alex
Williams who can post our theme. Thanks to Gabe Lucier
(48:07):
who helped us put this episode together search wise. Yeah,
thanks to Christopher Hasciotis. Because we just liked we just
like to thank him in general. Jonathan Strickland, the Quister
can go right to hell. Thanks shot at the Stricklin
Take the Quister. Thanks so much to you for listening,
and Nol, thank you for being you. You know, if
(48:27):
you are a body double right now, I will say
that you're doing a top notch job. I do. I
take my work very seriously. See letter Folks. For more
(48:55):
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio
app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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