It's jarring to hear Howard X, the Australian Kim Jong Un impersonator, describe being assaulted by North Korean agents as "a great experience".
Mr X (his pseudonym) attended the 2018 South Korea Winter Olympics dressed as the North Korean leader, and says agents "pushed me around" in front of cameras.
The media attention it drew "expose[d] what a kind of thuggish regime North Korea is", he says.
Addressing humanitarian issues is part of his MO. More than just a gig for gags, impersonation is his vehicle for political satire, and Mr X says it allows him to say and do things others can't.
"All of us impersonators poke fun at the people we impersonate. Especially me. I don't glorify Kim Jong Un, I do the opposite," he tells ABC RN's Sunday Extra.
But impersonation is also a job that carries significant risk.
"If I ever go to North Korea, I will be killed," Mr X says.
And more than once he's intervened to help fellow world leader impersonators at risk to flee persecution in their countries.
Kim Jong and Putin help Zelenskyy to safety
Mx X, who is based in Hong Kong but emigrated to Australia as a child in the 1990s, knew he was onto something the first time Kim Jong Un came on TV after his father, Kim Jong Il, died in 2011.
"I looked at his picture and thought, 'Oh, crap, I look like him'. Then everybody started saying the same thing."
He tried his likeness out in public for April Fool's Day in 2013 and posted the photos online. It was the start of a new career.
"Within two weeks, I got a call to go to Israel and make an advertisement," he says.
Work has been steady ever since, including for TV, music videos and public events.
But he's also been busy with humanitarian work.
As strange as it is to think of a fake Kim Jong Un turning to a pretend Putin to get a lookalike Zelenskyy out of war-ravaged Ukraine, that's exactly what recently happened.
Umid Isabaev is from Uzbekistan but had been living in Ukraine after an image of him asleep on a Russian train went viral. He shot to fame thanks to his uncanny likeness to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
In a surprise twist, production staff working on the Ukrainian TV political satire Servant of the People, which stars Mr Zelenskyy, who also created and produced it, then invited Isabaev to work as Mr Zelenskyy's double on the show.
"If you look at the TV series, the second half of the third season, you will see Umid doing all the faraway shots," Mr X says.
Mr X became aware of Mr Isabaev's work after the two appeared in a Russian documentary on impersonators around the world.
When Russia invaded the Ukraine, Mr X wanted to check how his peer was faring.
"I rang up and he happened to be in Kiev. I said, 'What the hell are you doing? You need to get the f**k out of there'," Mr X says.
To help get Mr Isabaev safely out of the country, he enlisted the help of another peer, a Polish Vladimir Putin impersonator who goes by the name of Steve Poland.
None of the men speak the same language so friends had to step in to act as translators.
"[Mr Isabaev] didn't know who we were. He was kind of mistrusting when I called him up," Mr X says.
"I told him, 'Look, you can see me on video, you know what I look like. And you can see the guy who plays Putin. We just want to save you because we consider you a colleague' … [and] because the Russians were actually after him."
Mr X says Putin impersonator Mr Poland had contacts within the Ukrainian resistance and found "somebody to go all the way into Kiev and get [Mr Isabaev] out".
"It took a lot of effort [but] we got him out of there."
Afghan Bruce Lee also flees
Mr Isabaev is not the only impersonator Mr X has helped to flee a war-ravaged country.
Afghan Bruce Lee impersonator, Abbas Alizada is "probably the best Bruce Lee impersonator I know", Mr X says.
"Not only does he look like him, but he spent his whole life practising martial arts."
He says Mr Alizada became unsafe when Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in 2021.
"He was stuck in Kabul and the Taliban was actually looking for him. They tried to go to his house two times to kill him," Mr X says.
"He escaped and my role was getting all the money together to help him escape."
He says Mr Alizada is now in a hostel with other Afghan refugees, waiting for an immigration application to Australia to be assessed.
Mr X says he'll keep trying to assist persecuted impersonators and, with them, try to draw attention to humanitarian issues around the world.
But he's also a businessman who is serious about earning a living impersonating Kim Jong Un.
And he's unafraid of ruffling feathers with some of his stunts, because, he says, "it's all good press. Because of that, you get work".
"I don't get tired of it. In fact, being a political impersonator of Kim Jong, I get away [with] saying things that no other impersonator, and nobody else, could get away with."
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