Adam Sandler Becomes the Bear Jew in Must-See Inglourious Basterds Deepfake

From Sylvester Stallone in Terminator 2 to Jim Carrey in The Shining, the possibilities presented by the ongoing proliferation of “deepfake” video technology are as endless as they are unsettling. In a pop-cultural context, at least, deepfake videos are fun as hell, allowing cinephiles to not only imagine, but also see the performances Hollywood never actually delivered for one reason or another. The latest example of this souped-up manifestation of fan-casting (first picked by The AV Club) corrects a Film Twitter-favorite missed connection, mapping the face of none other than Adam Sandler onto the iconic Inglourious Basterds character of Donnie “The Bear Jew” Donowitz, the bat-wielding, Nazi-bashing badass depicted by Eli Roth in Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 alternate-history WWII thriller.

The deepfaked scene, which comes to us courtesy of YouTube user Reds Only, is nowhere near as intense and upsetting as the actual, Roth-starring scene from the film, namely because Sandler’s dialogue is lifted from the opening moments of Billy Madison, a ridiculous scene in which Sandler’s title character is so drunk, he hallucinates a human-sized penguin in his front yard. It’s also worth nothing that the Sandler-ized Bear Jew doesn’t even appear until nearly a minute into the minute and a half-long clip, leaving much of what his version will look like to the imagination. But once Sandonowitz does appear, face on head, baseball bat in hand and enemy dog tags on chest, he strikes a seriously imposing figure. Granted, from there it’s all over but the Nazi bashing (topped off with a line out of Happy Gilmore’s Bob Barker fistfight scene), but the brief video still makes for a worthwhile imagining of what we could’ve ended up with in Tarantino’s finished film, had Sandler’s Funny People shooting schedule not interfered.

Watch the deepfaked video below, but after you do, have a good, long think about how this technology could be used for evil—we certainly will be.