Does a movie star ever really die? Not if Tom Hanks can help it. The Forest Gump actor wants to be the first human to cheat death by continuing his career long after his physical body fails him, in the form of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Is he crazy? Is it any crazier than the fact that we’re hurtling through space on a rock?
David S. Pumpkins himself appeared on an episode of The Adam Buxton Podcast and shared his thoughts on the possibility of digital immortality.
“If I wanted to, I could get together and pitch a series of seven movies that would star me in them in which I would be 32 years old from now until kingdom come,” he said.
He’s not wrong. First used 17 years ago in X-Men: The Last Stand on Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in a flashback, using AI and de-aging an actor is practically standard practice now. Even Martin Scorsese used it on Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, specifically in the 2019 snoozefest The Irishman.
The technology has also been used on Harrison Ford, Samuel L. Jackson, and Carrie Fisher, in their respective blockbusters. Do we even need new movie stars, or will we be stuck with the batch we have now forever? Hanks said that’s only going to get more prevalent.
“Outside of the understanding that it’s been done by AI or deep fake, there’ll be nothing to tell you that it’s not me and me alone and it’s going to have some degree of lifelike quality.”
Hanks said he knows that his AI ghost wouldn’t be able to quite nail a performance like he can now, but he doesn’t think anyone would really mind.
“Without a doubt, people will be able to tell, but the question is, will they care?” he said. “There are some people that won’t care, that won’t make that delineation.” Considering his likeness was recorded for perpetuity in the 2004 animated movie The Polar Express, there’s already a digital copy of Hanks on some server somewhere.
That was “the first time we did a movie that had a huge amount of our own data locked in a computer,” he said. There are some legal issues to iron out, however, in terms of using someone’s likeness and making sure it’s protected.
“I can tell you that there [are] discussions going on in all of the guilds, all of the agencies, and all of the legal firms in order to come up with the legal ramifications of my face and my voice and everybody else’s being our intellectual property,” he said. The future looks bright, on a movie screen anyway.
Hanks is currently on a press tour for his new book The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, which also sounds very boring but hey, who knows. Reviews aren’t great, but Hanks can dry his tears with $100 bills, so he’ll be fine.
