10 Actors Who Were Recreated With Special Effects In Movies

Following the tragic untimely death of Carrie Fisher, Lucasfilm now has a difficult time on their hands in terms of filling the gap she leaves in their plans for Star Wars: Episode IX. Given the fact that computer trickery was used to create a young Princess Leia in Rogue One, many thought that a similar method would be used in future movies. Surprisingly, however, Lucasfilm has confirmed that they will definitely not be completing Fisher's scenes with CGI. This is somewhat shocking as using special effects has always been the go-to method of resurrecting a sadly departed actor in the movies. Though some criticize the process for its dubious ethics and a general feeling of the uncanny valley, it's delivered a lot of success in many instances and for the most part, audiences seem to be alright with it. And so, with the issue once again becoming a hot topic thanks to Fisher's tragic death, we've decided to take a look back at 10 other instances in which special effects were used to bring an actor back to life. Not all of them have been terribly successful, but they're all notable for one reason or another. Enjoy! 10) Peter Cushing - Rogue One Back in 2005's Revenge of the Sith, when a cameo for Grand Moff Tarkin was required, the answer was to replace the late Peter Cushing with actor Wayne Pygram in heavy make-up. Come last year's Rogue One, however, and it was a much more elaborate process. For his prominent supporting role in the movie, Tarkin was played by British actor Guy Henry who gave his whole performance with facial capture equipment attached to his head. His own features were then replaced in post-production by a painstaking recreation of Cushing. Henry also shaved his head for the role to make the process of mapping Cushing's face on to his much easier. As for recreating Cushing, it proved a difficult task - but the visual effects team did find help from an unlikely source. They managed to get hold of a plaster cast of the actor from House of Long Shadows, a horror movie he made in the 1980s, which immeasurably aided in the study of Cushing's facial features. 9) Arnold Schwarzenegger - Terminator Salvation In the recent Terminator: Genesys, Arnold Schwarzenegger circa-1984 was digitally recreated for a fight scene with the real Schwarzenegger, as two T-800s went to battle. The previous Terminator movie also had to recreate the Austrian actor's likeness though, as on that occasion, Arnie wasn't involved in the film whatsoever. He was serving his second term as Governor of California at the time. For a scene where the newly-minted T-800 menaces Christian Bale's John Connor, a similarly-built body builder was recruited to stand-in for Schwarzenegger. To recreate his looks, the stand-in wore a handy facial prosthetic based off one made for the original The Terminator. This was then touched up with CGI in post-production. While this isn't one of the most ambitious of actor recreations - the T-800 has no lines, for example - it still resulted in one of the best scenes from the otherwise disappointing sequel. Thankfully, the uncanny valley aspect of the phoney Arnie wasn't so impactful here, as the Terminator is a robot anyway. 8) Roy Scheider - Iron Cross Best known Brody in Jaws, Roy Scheider's last movie was a little thriller called Iron Cross. It saw Scheider play Joseph, a Holocaust survivor who finally goes after the Nazi who killed his family in old age. Unfortunately, he passed away at the age of 75 before production completed. As there was just one key scene yet to complete, the filmmakers decided to employ a mix of some talented make-up work and state-of-the-art technology to finish the movie without him. They were granted permission to do so by Scheider's widow, actress Brenda Seimer-Scheider, and his family. In a mirror of the method used in Terminator Salvation, director Joshua Newton and his team employed an old-fashioned technique to resurrect Scheider on screen. Their first port of call was to create a prosthetic latex mask of the actor's very distinctive features which was then worn by a stand-in. Again, like Salvation, the effect was then finalized in post-production. 7) Phillip Seymour Hoffman - The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 Hollywood lost a great talent when Phillip Seymour Hoffman passed away at the age of 46. For The Hunger Games saga, in particular, his death resulted in the loss of a character who would have had a major role in the final movie, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2. Hoffman had joined the franchise in Catching Fire as rebel leader Plutarch Heavensbee and had been discussing how to play the character's big scene at the end of the final movie with director Francis Lawrence just before he died. After his death, filming schedules were revised to allow for shorter days so that the cast could have time to mourn his loss. In the end, only a small amount of digital trickery was used to complete Hoffman's scenes. For the aforementioned key moment between Plutarch and Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss, the filmmakers actually decided not to use any CGI whatsoever. Instead, they went for a much more low-fi solution - they gave the lines to Woody Harrelson's Hamitch, as he reads Katniss a letter from Heavensbee. 6) Marlon Brando - Superman Returns For the unusual reboot/sequel that was 2006's Superman Returns, director Bryan Singer was after something that would link his movie with the beloved films starring Christopher Reeve. He found it in Marlon Brando, who reprised his role as Superman's father Jor-El... despite having died two years earlier. For his appearance in the scene where Kevin Spacey's Lex Luthor and his goons storms the Fortress of Solitude, a blend of deleted scenes and outtakes from Superman II and some computer trickery was used to create Brando's disembodied talking head. Two speeches of Brando's from the original Superman movie are also used at the beginning and end of the film. "We had access to all of the Brando footage that was shot," Singer recalled. "There was unused footage that had Brando reciting poems, trailing off subject and swearing like a sailor." 5) Laurence Olivier - Sky Captain And The World of Tomorrow For pulpy movie serial throwback Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the filmmakers decided to add a bit of legitimacy and class by recruiting one of Britain's most respected actors ever as its villain, Laurence Olivier. The fact that he had died 13 years previously in 1989 wasn't a problem. In the movie, Jude Law's action-hero fighter pilot Sky Captain faces the evil Dr Totenkopf, a crazed Nazi scientist who created an A.I. hologram of himself to control his island lair before he died. In a process that would directly inspire Brando's appearance in Superman Returns two years later, footage and audio taken from the BBC's archives of the actor as a young man was digitally manipulated to fit into the film. It worked a treat in the movie itself, though we've no idea what the classical Shakespearean actor would have thought about being in such a wacky film. 4) Paul Walker - Furious 7 Fast and Furious fans were crushed when the franchise's star, Paul Walker, was killed in a car crash in 2013. This caused a big problem for Furious 7, which was only halfway through production at the time. To bring the late actor back to life, director James Wan hired Peter Jackson's company Weta Digital, who had previously turned Andy Serkis into Gollum and King Kong to great success. Their job was made a lot easier when they cast Walker's two brothers, Caleb and Cody, to stand in as the actor, as they both had a great resemblance to Paul. With two solid body stand-ins in place, they then recreated Paul's face with CGI, basing it off footage pulled from outtakes or old unused footage. One big issue was that Weta needed to relight every shot of his face digitally, to match the lightning used in the movie scenes. It was a monumental task for the company, but in the end they pulled it off, re-creating a whopping 350 digital shots for Furious 7. 3) Oliver Reed - Gladiator Filming for Ridley Scott's epic Gladiator hit a major snag when Oliver Reed - who played the gruff mentor to Russell Crowe's Maximus - sadly died of a heart attack on location in Malta. As the actor had yet to complete all his scenes as Proximo, a lot of work had to be put into digitally reconstituting his face for the remainder of the film. Along with shooting body doubles in the shadows and the occasional use of a mannequin, the main method used was to map a three-dimensional computer-generated mask of Reed onto another actor. Overall, the cost for the tricky procedure is estimated to be about $3.2 million, even though it only accounted for about two minutes of footage in the final film. "What we did was small compared to our other tasks on the film," said visual effects supervisor John Nelson on the process. "What Oliver did was much greater. He gave an inspiring, moving performance. All we did was help him finish it." 2) Bruce Lee - Game of Death In 1972, Bruce Lee started a passion project - a martial arts movie called Game of Death that he would write, direct, produce and star in. Sadly, he died at the young age of 32 before filming had completed. Eventually, in 1978, a new version of the movie was recut and completed with various methods used to cover up the loss of Lee. Stock footage from his early work was spliced in, body doubles were filmed with wide shots or in poor lighting and in one scene, a cardboard cut-out of Lee's head was pasted onto a mirror. Finally, in a strangely macabre move, footage from Lee's actual funeral was incorporated into the film - including a shot of his real-life corpse in an open-topped casket. While these techniques were far away from the towering technical achievements in modern examples, they were really the first of their kind as this was the first time an actor had been resurrected with camera trickery in a major sense. 1) Brandon Lee - The Crow Speaking of Bruce Lee, it's one of Hollywood's most tragic coincidences that his son, Brandon Lee, also died at the tender age of 28. Lee was in the middle of filming The Crow when a freak accident involving a piece of shrapnel lodged in a prop gun resulted in him being killed on set. In a strange twist of fate, this real-life incident almost exactly mirrors a scene from his father's final film Game of Death. With only eight days of shooting left to complete (with Lee himself only scheduled for three more), director Alex Proyas decided to continue on with the movie. Lee's stunt double, Chad Stahelski, stood in place of the late actor and top-end CGI was used to plaster a recreation of Lee's face onto his. Computer graphics company Dream Quest spent a gruelling 600 hours perfecting the process and further trouble came when original distributor Paramount Pictures pulled out due to the negative publicity surrounding the movie. Thankfully, Miramax later snapped up the film. To Dream Quest's credit, they did an impressively seamless job. For its time, it was a terrific accomplishment and still holds up to this day.