There is a trend in Hollywood to use digital make-up to dramatically reduce the apparent age of actors. Most recently, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent put Nick Cage on the screen with a simulacrum of his much younger self.
The technology is still not 100% mature, and the virtual Nick Cage looked slightly uncanny. So have other virtual younger representations, such as Carrie Fisher in Rogue One and DeNiro, Pacino and Pesci in The Irishman.
In the case of the Nick Cage film I think the uncanniness sort of worked, because the younger version of Cage was supposed to be an unreal fantasy figure. That covers a lot of sins.
There will come a time, as technology advances, when de-aging digital make-up will not only look perfectly real, but will become easy to do and inexpensive. When that happens, older actors will likely routinely take on much younger roles. This will simply become accepted as a normal part of the filmmaking process.
But the frontier after that, one which is far more difficult, is to use digital make-up to allow one actor to create a perfect impression of a different actor. This will also allow living actors to take on roles made iconic by actors already deceased.
I suspect that whenever that technology reaches maturity, it will involve not just CGI but also Machine Learning to model the dynamic facial musculature of the original actor. Fortunately those algorithms will have lots of good labeled data to work from, thanks to old movies.
Even if they can de-age the actors, replicating the movement of a much younger person is tough. It was one of the glaring tells in The Irishman.
Another example this reminds me of is the end of Madonna’s “Hung Up” video. Even though Madonna was in fantastic shape for a woman well into her 40s, her dance moves still feel out of step in a room full of kids half her age.
It is high time to judge an actor by their acting abilities, rather than their appearances 🙂
Yeah. My son is an actor in LA. Auditioning for rolls is a huge part of the job.
It’s disturbing to realize now he may now be competing with dead people.