In an Interview, Deep Voodoo's Matt Stone Says AI Will Benefit TV

Matt Stone gets deepfaked into his deepfake video of Kendrick Lamar

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In a professionally lighted brick-walled space in Venice, not different from many other professionally lighted brick-walled spaces all over Los Angeles, actors routinely come in to have their photos and video taken.

The process is quick and unremarkable to anyone familiar with the studio-shoot culture of the city, where the backdrops change but the conventions stay the same.

Yet the similarities with a typical Hollywood shoot end after the camera switches off at the offices of this boutique firm known as Deep Voodoo. The images and video are converted into data bits and sent to AI-model experts employed all over the world. One in Eastern Europe, another in Argentina, a third in Vancouver. They work their machine-training magic, relying on compute from a data center at an undisclosed location. Eventually all that data gets turned into the desired object: a de-aged actor or deepfake or other synthetic image that can used for various forms of entertainment.

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All of that would be intriguing even if the founders of Deep Voodoo weren’t South Park instigators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. But among all their taboo-busting, the Book of Mormon pair, it turns out, are also burgeoning AI pioneers. And for the past several years they have been quietly deploying their company to help production labels achieve their effects goals, making housecalls as doctors of deepfakes.

“I find that a lot of discussions about AI become tiresome. You know ‘put your taxes in and it can do them,'” says Stone, 54, in a rare interview about Deep Voodoo. “And it’s like, ‘cool, but a human can do your taxes.’ What we’re trying to do is something no amount of humans can do.”

Something like, well, the more than half-dozen viral projects Deep Voodoo was behind that you may not have even known it was behind. If you’ve watched that Kendrick Lamar music video from a few years ago where the rapper’s face morphs surreally into O.J. Simpson, Will Smith and Jussie Smollett, you’ve already seen its handiwork; ditto that Bill Clinton food-counter eruption in Ted earlier this month, or the Affleck & Co. ’90’s-revisionism for Dunkin’ Donuts at the Super Bowl last month, or the shocking Donald Trump full-frontal deepfake in the Season 27 South Park opener last summer.

But with Generative AI now poised to become a mainstay in Hollywood, Deep Voodoo videos could come at us even more often. If a studio or production house needs something shape-shifting or face-switching, chances are they’ll call Parker & Stone. And chances are something strange — and, perhaps even more surprising when it comes to AI, potentially ethical — will result.

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Deep Voodoo wasn’t even supposed to be a company.

It only exists because of Donald Trump.

Late in the first Trump administration, Parker and Stone were developing a Donald Trump deepfake movie. Their plan: to graft his face onto another actor’s body and have him progressively lose his marbles, and then eventually his clothing. But the duo couldn’t get a studio to match the quality of the tech they needed. “A couple of effects houses in LA just kind of gave us the runaround. This has happened before in our career, where we go, ‘okay, well, we’ve got to go figure it out ourselves,'” Stone says. So they went online, rounded up some AI whizkids and formed an outfit to do it themselves.

The movie may not have come to fruition — it was scrapped by covid — but the team endured. One product: Sassy Justice, a Web series parodying public figures. A 14-minute episode with a deepfaked Trump went viral. While the visuals and audio seem clunky from the vantage point of 2026, they were downright renegade five years ago — good enough that Parker and Stone even used some of them for the July South Park season opener.

Another result: a full-blown company. By late 2022, Deep Voodoo was so established it had raised $20 million, in part from a CAA-connected venture, before many people thought a lot about AI in Hollywood.

The firm appears engineered to keep a low profile. Its two executives are even-keeled to the extreme. An animation veteran named Jennifer Howell, who once produced South Park and worked at half the studios in town, is its chief content officer, while its CEO, Afshin Beyzaee, is an unflashy lawyer who came to the job after serving for years as chief counsel at Parker and Stone’s Park County production company.

Neither is likely to dazzle (or rage-bait) you with Silicon Valley grandiosities; they are prone to saying strait-laced things like “it’s very inappropriate to be taking and making use of someon