Body double? Fat chance!
A famous Kim Jong Un impersonator says there’s no way the North Korean leader could find a convincing lookalike in the food-starved nation — because he’s too obese.
“He’s not just chubby, he’s really fat. Where are you going to find a fat person in North Korea?” the Hong Kong-based performer, who goes by Howard X, told The Post.
“To feed them both, the bill would be through the roof.”
The full-time impersonator, who’s in his early 40s, said he maintains a pudgy physique through a strict regime of “not exercising” and “eating a lot of quality steaks” — but he still weighs about 50 pounds less than the tubby tyrant.
So he doesn’t buy the wild theory that a body double for Kim appeared at a recent event in order to hide the fact that the Supreme Leader is dying.
And he believes footage that emerged from years ago that purports to show the dictator’s hired doppelganger is bogus.
“The guy you see there is one of his party members … once the guy turns around, one can see that he looks nothing like Kim and is quite old,” he said.
But Howard X — who declined to give his real name because he has received “death threats” over his profession — would never consider body doubling for Kim, because the leader’s agents once roughed him up for doing a spoof, he said.
While at the Pyeongchang Olympics in 2018, he did an impromptu parody performance next to North Korean cheerleaders, prompting officers to “assault” him, he said.
“I thought the cheerleaders where hogging [the spotlight] and I wanted to take the piss out of them,” he said. “North Korean agents pushed me around. I was assaulted.”
He added, “If they asked me to body double now, I’d say, ‘No way. I don’t like you’ … Dictatorships don’t have a sense of humor. That would be like working for the Nazis.”
In June 2018, he was also hassled, detained and questioned after arriving in Singapore days before a summit between Kim and President Trump.
He has also made popular satirical YouTube videos, including one in which “he makes love to a nuclear weapon” while playing the Hermit King.
But recent reports that Kim may be gravely ill — including a photo showing a mark on his wrist, possibly indicating he’d been hospitalized — have left him worried about his job.
“When I first heard he got sick, I thought, ‘There goes my career,’” he said. “But now I think he’ll be OK. He has better health care than most Americans.”