Bogus Bill Gates in Facebook movie

In the late 1980s people started telling Bothell civil engineer Steve Sires he looked a lot like another famous Eastside guy who spent his days hunched over a computer.

“I didn’t know who Bill Gates was,” says Sires.

Wait, what? How could he not know Gates – co-founder of Microsoft, richest guy in America, gives away millions, has a huge mansion in Medina?

“I’d lived in Alaska until ’88 and then moved down from Alaska,” he says, “and until then I had never heard of Bill Gates.”

He figured out very quickly who Gates was and did his first stunt double of the billionaire in 1998 at the grand opening of the Kirkland Performing Arts Center. Sires voice doesn’t sound like Gates at all, and he doesn’t even try to imitate his speech. He does have the billionaire’s mannerisms down, from the hand gestures to wandering on stage and moving his arms around as he speaks.

Producers of the new movie about Facebook saw Sires’s website Bogus Bill and cast him for the Bill Gates role in the movie The Social Network. Sires is on screen for about 10 seconds, giving a lecture at Harvard with film’s version of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, in the audience. Later, students joke about Zuckerberg being “the next Bill Gates.”

“It was me on screen and that was my voice, but it’s not my voice straight. They’ve certainly done some audio tweaking to it,” he says.

By the way, Sires has never met Bill Gates. He’s made about $100,000 over the past decade doubling as Gates for various events.

“A little coin is nice to have once in a while,” he says “My wife and I have been all over the world enjoying different cultures and different countries that we’ve had a chance to go to that we would otherwise not have been able to do.”