A virtual actor, also known as virtual human, virtual persona, digital actor, or digital clone is the creation or re-creation of a human being in image and voice using computer-generated imagery and sound, that is often indistinguishable from the real actor. The idea of a virtual actor was first portrayed in the 1981 film Looker, wherein models had their bodies scanned digitally to create 3D computer-generated images of the models, which were then animated for use in television commercials. Two 1992 books used this concept: Fools by Pat Cadigan, and Et Tu, Babe by Mark Leyner. In general, virtual humans employed in movies are known as synthespians, virtual actors, cyberstars, or silicentric actors. There are several legal ramifications for the digital cloning of human actors, relating to copyright and personality rights. People who have already been digitally cloned as simulations include Bill Clinton, Marilyn Monroe, Fred Astaire, Ed Sullivan, Elvis Presley, Bruce Lee, Audrey Hepburn, Anna Marie Goddard, and George Burns. By 2002, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Carrey, Kate Mulgrew, Michelle Pfeiffer, Denzel Washington, Gillian Anderson, and David Duchovny had all had their heads laser scanned to create digital computer models thereof.
Early history Early computer-generated animated faces include the 1985 film Tony de Peltrie and the music video for Mick Jagger's song "Hard Woman" (from She's the Boss). The first actual human beings to be digitally duplicated were Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart in a March 1987 film "Rendez-vous in Montreal" created by Nadia Magnenat Thalmann and Daniel Thalmann for the 100th anniversary of the Engineering Institute of Canada. The film was created by six people over a year, and had Monroe and Bogart meeting in a café in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The characters were rendered in three dimensions, and were capable of speaking, showing emotion, and shaking hands. In 1987, the Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company (now Synthespian Studios), founded by Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak coined the term "synthespian" and began its Synthespian ("synthetic thespian") Project, with the aim of creating "life-like figures based on the digital animation of clay models". In 1988, Tin Toy was the first entirely computer-generated movie to win an Academy Award (Best Animated Short Film). In the same year, Mike the Talking Head, an animated head whose facial expression and head posture were controlled in real time by a puppeteer using a custom-built controller, was developed by Silicon Graphics, and performed live at SIGGRAPH. In 1989, The Abyss, directed by James Cameron included a computer-generated face placed onto a watery pseudopod. In 1991, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, also directed by Cameron, confident in the abilities of computer-generated effects from his experience with The Abyss, included a mixture of synthetic actors with live animation, including computer models of Robert Patrick's face. The Abyss contained just one scene with photo-realistic computer graphics. Terminator 2: Judgment Day contained over forty shots throughout the film. In 1997, Industrial Light & Magic worked on creating a virtual actor that was a composite of the bodily parts of several real actors. In 2000, Microsoft Research published an article by Gordon Bell and Jim Gray, titled "Digital immortality." The authors worked on the system called MyLifeBits to create a "digital clone" of a person from digital data.
21st century By the 21st century, virtual actors had become a reality. The face of Brandon Lee, who had died partway through the shooting of The Crow in 1994, had been digitally superimposed over the top of a body-double in order to complete those parts of the movie that had yet to be filmed. By 2001, three-dimensional computer-generated realistic humans had been used in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and by 2004, a synthetic Laurence Olivier co-starred in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
Star Wars Since the mid-2010s, the Star Wars franchise has become particularly notable for its prominent usage of virtual actors, driven by a desire in recent entries to reuse characters that first appeared in the original trilogy during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The 2016 Star Wars Anthology film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is a direct prequel to the 1977 film Star Wars: A New Hope, with the ending scene of Rogue One leading almost immediately into the opening scene of A New Hope. As such, Rogue One called for Industrial Light & Magic to make digital recreations of certain characters so they would look the same as they did in A New Hope, specifically the roles of Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin (played and voiced by Guy Henry) and Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia (played by Ingvild Deila and voiced by an archive recording of Fisher). Cushing had died in 1994, while Fisher was not available to play Leia during production and died a few days after the film's release. Similarly, the 2020 second season of The Mandalorian briefly featured a digital recreation of Mark Hamill's character Luke Skywalker (played by an uncredited body double and voiced by an audio deepfake recreation of Hamill's voice) as portrayed in the 1983 film Return of the Jedi. Canonically, The Mandalorian's storyline takes place roughly five years after the events of Return of the Jedi.
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