Late Alien actor Ian Holm was brought back to life with AI technology for the new movie Alien: Romulus.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for ‘Alien: Romulus.’
Alien: Romulus is the latest installment in the science fiction movie franchise that began with Ridley Scott’s classic 1979 film Alien.
In the original Alien movie, late British actor Ian Holm plays the synthetic android Ash — a sleeper agent who is acting upon secret orders to bring back the dangerous alien lifeform and considers the human crew aboard commercial space tug Nostromo to be expendable.
Holm — who was also well-known for playing the older Bilbo Baggins in the Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit trilogies — passed away in June 2020 at the age of 88.
However, for the latest Alien: Romulus movie, the filmmakers resurrected the late actor Holm as a new android character called Rook with the help of AI technology.
How Ian Holm Was Brought Back to Life for Alien: Romulus
The ability of filmmakers to bring dead actors back to the screen through AI technology is still relatively new — and highly controversial. Last year, SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union that represents 160,000 entertainment industry professionals, had a four-month-long strike against Hollywood studios — with AI being a major sticking point.
Actors were concerned that Hollywood studios would create AI replicas of them in perpetuity without their consent.
As a result of the strike, SAG-AFTRA reached a deal with major Hollywood studios securing protections for actors against artificial intelligence. Employers must now receive consent from performers or their estate to use their likenesses in a project for which they were not employed, or to digitally alter their performances. Actors must also be paid for this.
According to Variety, Alien: Romulus director Fede Alvarez consequently confirmed that the filmmakers first contacted Holm’s estate to get approval before embarking on using the late actor’s likeness in the movie.
In Alien: Romulus, Holm’s character Rook is a malfunctioning android whose damaged head and upper body is propped up on a table. So the filmmakers used an animatronic body and CGI to create a simulacrum of Holm.
Actor Daniel Betts also provided facial performances, which were then altered by generative AI and computer modeling to get closer to Holm’s appearance.
To re-create Holm’s voice and intonations, Betts also performed the dialogue, and the recording was fed through a software called Speecher, which modified the actor’s voice based on Ash’s dialogue pulled from the original Alien movie.
Eric Barba, the production VFX supervisor of Alien: Romulus, said that the filmmakers took 4K scans of the original film Alien which provided a useful guide in creating Holm’s performance in the new film and gave them training data.
The filmmakers also used AI-enabled techniques from startup Metaphysic to bring Holm back to life in Alien: Romulus.
“They [Metaphysic] were able to retarget the eyes, to fix the eye lines,” Barba tells Variety. “Their tools are fantastic for us to be able to… really kind of direct the performance.”
Startup Metaphysic also helped the filmmakers behind Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga to use AI to make a child actor look like the lead actress Anya Taylor-Joy and blend their faces together. Actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright were also digitally de-aged for the upcoming film Here with AI-assisted technology by Metaphysic.
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