The De-aging of Old Actors Needs to End
Sure, studios can make Kurt Russell and Johnny Depp look 25 again. But is it necessary?
Hollywood has always been the land of the uncanny face. But in 2017, the veteran actor who used to need plastic surgery to look young never has to get old in the first place. Thanks to advancing technology — and with some makeup, a couple of stand-in actors, and a few clicks of a computer — CGI wizards can now smooth out wrinkles and blast away crow’s feet, restore cherubic beauty, and make sure our famous elders can play themselves in flashbacks until, and even after, they’re gone from this earth. The years on the calendar may continue to elapse, but it will always look like 1986 on the big screen if you want it to. It has to stop.
The process of de-aging has become more popular (and the technology more advanced) since 44-year-old Brad Pitt played a younger version of himself in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and looked more like an extra in The Polar Express movie. After the movie’s release in 2008, Ed Ulbrich, president of the company behind the special effects, made a prediction: "I think we’re in the early days of human animation, completely and utterly believable human characters." He was right: Captain America: Civil War featured scenes with a teenaged Robert Downey Jr., HBO’s series Westworld brought then-78-year-old Anthony Hopkins back to his 30s, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 opened with a much-younger-looking Kurt Russell, and most recently, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales used the technology to revert Johnny Depp to what he looked like before he became an actual pirate. If a big-budget movie has flashbacks in it, the odds are good that filmmakers will opt for the de-aging technology.
But … why? I’m earnestly asking, because I can’t come up with a good reason. De-aging mostly comes off as a budget flex. Writing about the VFX’ed Russell in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis aptly commented, "It’s a distraction that shows a filmmaker making a bad decision mostly, it seems, because he can afford to." Because what else could it boil down to? The fact that a director just loves to play with new technology? Or was the previous standard practice of hiring a look-alike actor to play the younger version of a character (as in movies like Looper, X-Men: First Class, and Men in Black 3) not cutting it? The minimal discrepancies between two disparately aged actors were so glaring that millions had to be spent on giving Downey a digital face-lift?
The practice and its execution are so distracting that the goal is irrelevant. For all the technological tinkering and clamoring about de-aging being at "a new pinnacle," these visual effects companies still haven’t been able to drag their youth-inized creations out of the uncanny valley. As Russell’s Younger Ego lovingly glances at Peter Quill’s mother from the driver’s seat of his Trans-Am, or as Downey Jr.’s Younger Tony Stark throws witticisms at his still-alive parents, the characters appear as chilling amalgams of human beings — someone’s real arm, and someone’s real head, and a weird CGI’d face on top of the whole thing. As an audience member you get the creeping feeling that you’re not watching a person, but rather an entity imitating a person. It’s weird — much weirder than seeing a younger actor who only kind of looks like the character he’s playing a version of.
Questions of why and how Hopkins or Russell were de-aged crowd out the substance of whatever’s actually happening onscreen. That was even more so the case when director Gareth Edwards used the technology for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, not only de-aging Carrie Fisher for a quick, young Princess Leia cameo, but digitally resurrecting the late Peter Cushing for scenes featuring his character from A New Hope, Grand Moff Tarkin. Many questioned the ethics of putting a person into a movie who has no agency in the decision because they’ve been dead for two decades. Beyond that, the digitized Cushing and Fisher just looked … eerie.
Despite its amplified use, the technology for de-aging is still so patchy that it’s always immediately noticeable. But even if de-aged characters could look perfect, would that be a compelling enough reason to employ the technology? The practice is always going to be a distraction — no matter how believable it looks, making a 65-year-old actor look 25 will never not be jarring — and there are so many other ways filmmakers can spend their time without pulling audiences clean out of their movies. "It’s not cheap and it’s not easy. That pretty much took our entire post-production period to finish," Guardians director James Gunn told The Washington Post about the de-aging process, as if supreme difficulty and cost are good reasons to do anything.
The solution is staring us right in our non-digitally-enhanced faces. To make Johnny Depp and Kurt Russell seem younger in their respective movies, Disney hired actors Anthony De La Torre and Aaron Schwartz as stand-ins, maquettes atop which VFX artists could construct younger versions of the leading men. This is what De La Torre (left) and Schwartz (right) look like:
(Getty Images)
Couldn’t they just have, I don’t know, cast these actors? They look enough like young Johnny Depp and Kurt Russell, and they don’t cost a fortune in Amazon Web Services fees. Would these movies have lost anything by keeping these actors as is, leaving their faces untouched by lackluster digital sorcery? Of course not. No one goes to a movie to remember what a young Johnny Depp looks like — that’s what DVDs of Benny & Joon are for. De-aging needs to stop before it gets out of control. It’s an imperfect solution for a problem that didn’t exist, and that does nothing more for a movie than shout "CHECK OUT MY WALLET." Also, the de-aged Johnny Depp won’t stop haunting my dreams. Let’s cool it with the de-aging, Hollywood, if only so we can sleep better.