In an early sequence in The Irishman, Industrial Light & Magic‘s great expertise makes Robert De Niro’s face appear smooth and decades younger when he delivers a punch in a parking lot. The face appears to be about forty years old. Beneath it, the body moves like a seventy-year-old guy. It was a technological triumph, according to Martin Scorsese. Many spectators described it as something else—not quite right, disturbing in a way that was difficult to identify at first but impossible to ignore once detected.
The main issue with digital de-aging is the discrepancy between what the body shows and what the face indicates, and Hollywood has been reluctant to publicly acknowledge this. Over the previous ten years, technology has advanced significantly. The uncanny valley effect, which causes spectators to feel uneasy when something appears almost but not quite human, has been lessened but not completely erased because to studios’ ability to smooth decades off a face with convincing realism. The problem is that a person’s age can be inferred from more than just their face. We can learn more from movement. The way a sixty-year-old bears tension in their shoulders, shifts their equilibrium, and supports their weight does not age along with their skin.
As may be expected, ambition affects the visual outcomes. It’s not the same as trying to make a sixty-year-old actor appear twenty-five again. In scenarios that are more subdued and have controlled lighting, the former can appear sufficiently convincing. The latter often disintegrates practically instantly. For a movie that was designed around it from the beginning, Samuel L. Jackson’s portrayal of Nick Fury in Captain Marvel, who was several decades younger, worked fairly well. De-aged for an extended opening sequence, Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny elicited further conflicting opinions; he was technically excellent in some scenes, a little off in others, and never quite allowed the viewer to settle down.
It is more difficult to answer the ethical issues that underlie all of this than the technological ones. The direct result of a studio investing in de-aging technology to prolong the career of a sixty-five-year-old male action hero is that younger actors, who would be more appropriate for those roles, are not cast. It’s a subtle kind of gatekeeping disguised as nostalgia, and one could argue that it’s impeding the development of new screen icons in the action genre. Hollywood has always been hesitant to let go of what is successful, but digital tools have given that resistance a new lease on life.
This has an obvious gender component that is, to be honest, a little hard to ignore. In order to stay viable in physically demanding leading-man parts far into their sixties, male performers are frequently de-aged. There is a dearth of comparable investment in female actresses of comparable age. It is not possible for older women to lead action franchises thru digital rejuvenation. They either take on supporting roles or vanish from major positions. In this way, the technology is not neutral; rather than generating a new inequality, it is exacerbating an already-existing one.
The longer question is what studios can do with an actor’s likeness once the performance has been recorded and the de-aging procedure is finished. Due in part to the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA strikes that brought AI and digital likeness protections to the table in 2023, current contracts are finally catching up. However, there is a genuine feeling that the gap between capability and consent has not completely closed, and the legal system is still catching up to what is technically feasible. What appears to be a transient, flashback-scene tool now might become something far more widespread in ten years. It is still really unclear how and by whom that is governed.
