Play it again, and again, Sam

Filmmakers have long recycled old footage to create something new.

Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983) seamlessly slipped its chameleon‑like protagonist into old newsreels, while Forrest Gump (1994) placed Tom Hanks alongside a range of historical figures with what was then cutting‑edge digital trickery. 

Even advertising embraced the technique decades ago, most memorably with a Diet Coke commercial that resurrected Humphrey Bogart to appear alongside Elton John. 

But while those examples relied on painstaking manual effects, today’s rapidly advancing artificial intelligence promises not just the revival of beloved performers, but the manufacture of entirely synthetic stars. 

The most striking recent example is the announcement that Val Kilmer, who died in April 2025, will posthumously appear in the forthcoming film As Deep as the Grave. 

Producers say his performance was generated using “state‑of‑the‑art generative AI technology”. They worked closely with Kilmer’s estate, which authorised and approved the digital version of the actor. 

The project, described as the first feature‑length acting performance enabled by generative AI, is a significant escalation from earlier uses of CGI and voice synthesis in Kilmer’s work, including Top Gun: Maverick, which employed an AI‑generated voice model based on archival recordings.

What distinguishes this moment from past digital resurrections, such as Carrie Fisher in The Rise of Skywalker or Paul Walker in Furious 7, is that AI now generates not only faces and voices but full performances.

Director Coerte Voorhees began making his film while Kilmer was still alive and only turned to AI when the actor’s illness made filming impossible. The result is a performance built from machine‑learning models trained on decades of screen work.  

But AI isn’t only reviving familiar faces; it’s inventing new ones. 

Xicoia, an AI talent studio, has unveiled a photorealistic, entirely synthetic performer named Tilly Norwood, generating fierce debate within Hollywood. 

Norwood exists purely as a digital construct, created through thousands of iterations of facial modelling, animation, and voice algorithms, with her developers envisioning dozens more AI performers forming a “digital talent universe”.  

This raises unprecedented questions: If actors can be synthesised indefinitely, what becomes of human expression, artistic effort, and authenticity? 

The actors’ union, SAG‑AFTRA, has already voiced concerns about AI, insisting on strict rules around consent and digital replication.  

As AI becomes ubiquitous – from de‑ageing (as was done to Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) to full‑body digital doubles – filmmakers are gaining astonishing creative freedom. 

But audiences may soon face a more complex challenge: deciding whether what they’re seeing is a performance, a simulation, or something in between. 

In the future, the question may not be how films are made, but whether we can still trust our eyes and our ears at all. 

Related reading:  ABC, Sky News, NBC News, University of Virginia