Bill Vendall is Sanjaya is Bill Vendall.
That’s the cryptic message we’re left with at the end of a video, posted on YouTube last week, in which infamous “American Idol” contestant Sanjaya Malakar claims he is actually 25-year-old industrial design graduate student Bill Vendall — and that he created the Sanjaya persona for an art installation project.
“I’m sure many of you subconsciously knew what I was doing,” a sunglasses-wearing Sanjaya says in the video. “How could you look at this, this and this,” he says amid flashes of scenes of his different hairdos, “and not see it as a symbol for the self-referencing nature of progressive evolution?”
Turns out the video was a hoax commissioned by Will Ferrell for his Web site funnyordie.com, according to Access Hollywood. But even though Sanjaya’s acting is arguably worse than his singing, some people bought it.
“I was having fun and then people believed that I was actually Bill Vendall,” Sanjaya told Access. “I’m not Bill Vendall!”
