When someone told Brent Mendenhall that he looked just like George W. Bush, he was offended.
“I was at a wedding on the Labor Day weekend of `98, and the sister of the bride was from Dallas,” Mendenhall recalled. “She came up and told me I looked just like Bush. At the time I was in my late 40s, and I thought to myself, `I don’t look that old.’ I finally figured out she wasn’t talking about the former president. She was talking about the Texas governor.”
Mendenhall had heard of George W. Bush, but he had never seen a photo of him. That wouldn’t happen until May of the following year, when the younger Bush announced he was running for the presidency.
Now, of course, George W.’s mug is everywhere, and Mendenhall, a 52-year-old former construction supervisor who has lived all but a few of his earliest years in Nevada, Mo., has a new career as a presidential lookalike.
He has appeared several times on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” and portrayed the U.S. president on television series such as “JAG” and “The X-Files.” He was briefly seen this year in the feature film “Life or Something Like It” being interviewed by a Barbara Walterish-television personality played by Stockard Channing.
But Mendenhall’s real bread and butter comes from traveling around the country making appearances at corporate events hosted by such corporations as Kraft Foods Inc.
“Somebody will go out first and tell the audience they have a special guest,” Mendenhall said. “Then they start playing `Hail to the Chief,’ and I come out surrounded by my `Secret Service’ guys–they’re actually just people I’ve given dark glasses, fake radio ear plugs and an American flag lapel pin.”
Standing at a podium decorated with a faux presidential seal–instead of “The President of the United States” it reads “A Resident of the United States”–Mendenhall immediately breaks the ice and signals to any confused audience members that he’s not the real thing.
“It’s good to be in,” he says, and then deliberately mispronounces the name of the city he’s in.
Other jokes follow, and after 20 or 30 minutes of often raunchy bipartisan political humor, Mendenhall will wave to the assembly and leave the hall with his bodyguards.
He says he charges $4,000 to $9,000 per appearance and does four or five gigs a month. So far his travels have taken him all over the United States, to two Canadian provinces and once to London.
“It’s kind of a weird way to earn a living,” he acknowledges. “One minute you have a ballroom full of people believing you’re the leader of the free world.
“An hour later they give you cab fare and send you off to the airport.”