Funny or Die Made a Trump Biopic, Starring Johnny Depp

LOS ANGELES — Johnny Depp has played a loopy pirate, a mad hatter and a demon barber. But will he be a convincing Donald J. Trump?

The humor website Funny or Die on Wednesday began streaming a 50-minute comedy that finds Mr. Depp portraying the businessman turned politician, full-blown comb-over and all. Kept a secret for months — no small task in Hollywood — “Funny or Die Presents Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The Movie” was released to coincide with Mr. Trump’s victory on Tuesday in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary.

“It was a crazy, completely nuts idea that somehow we pulled off,” said Adam McKay, a co-founder of Funny or Die, which also counts Will Ferrell and Judd Apatow as principal partners and produces exclusive material that often features well-known stars. Mr. McKay, the director of “The Big Short,” which is a contender for best picture at the coming Academy Awards, added that the site’s newest skewering of Mr. Trump will “with any luck” annoy the presidential hopeful.

Johnny Depp as Donald Trump Credit via Funny or Die
A Trump spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

“The Art of the Deal,” which takes its title from Mr. Trump’s 1987 best-selling business advice book, may establish a new Hollywood genre: the fake television movie of the week. As a narrator (the director Ron Howard, playing himself) tells viewers at its start, the movie was made in the 1980s and had Mr. Trump as its writer-producer-director-star. But a football game went into overtime, pre-empting the movie, and so an angry Mr. Trump ordered the prime-time special pulled and forever tucked away in a vault.

Mr. Howard supposedly discovered this Hollywood relic. Mr. McKay, speaking by phone and keeping up the joke, said that his site “views this movie as an important historical document that has been hidden away, much like Jerry Lewis’s Holocaust clown movie.” (“The Day the Clown Cried,” a 1972 film written, directed and starring Mr. Lewis as a clown being held in a concentration camp, was never released.)

Mr. Depp, who was not available for an interview, spent four days in early December taping the faux movie. Other characters are played by Jack McBrayer, Patton Oswalt, Alfred Molina, Henry Winkler, Andy Richter and Jacob Tremblay, among others. Michaela Watkins, known for her work on “Saturday Night Live” and Hulu’s “Casual,” was cast as Ivana Trump.

In keeping with the 1980s setting, Kenny Loggins wrote the theme song. The script for “The Art of the Deal” was written by Joe Randazzo, a former editor of The Onion and a writer for the Comedy Central series “@midnight.” Jeremy Konner, a creator of the television series “Drunk History,” directed “The Art of the Deal.”

Like most comedy outlets, Funny or Die has mocked Mr. Trump before. In September, for instance, Mr. McKay was a co-writer of the script for a video called “Mexican Donald Trump,” which found George Lopez playing Donaldo Trumpez and proposing a border wall to “keep the lazy Americans out”; it has since been viewed more than 10 million times on multiple platforms, according to a Funny or Die spokeswoman.

The idea for “The Art of the Deal” started with Owen Burke, who became Funny or Die’s editor in chief in early September. Mr. Burke pitched the concept to Mr. McKay, who in turn proposed it to Mr. Depp. (Fun fact: Mr. Burke’s father, while working at ABC in 1980, helped put “Nightline” on the air.)

“The plan was to move really fast because we thought Trump would go away, as least as a presidential candidate,” Mr. Burke said. “When he bizarrely didn’t go away, we had a little more time. But that meant keeping the secret for longer.”

How did they zip everyone’s lips?

“We had a few people sign nondisclosures, but mostly we just begged people not to say anything,” Mr. Burke said. (Underscoring the difficulty of keeping these kind of productions secret, especially when they involve major stars, word leaked last spring that Mr. Ferrell and Kristen Wiig were working privately on a Lifetime movie called “A Deadly Adoption,” which ran in June.)

Mr. Burke said everyone at Funny or Die was blown away by Mr. Depp’s professionalism. “Because we tend to move so fast, we’re usually just slapping wigs on people,” he said. “But Johnny brought, like, a whole team of professionals to help him get into character. Or at least style his hair.”