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And there you thought Keanu Reeves and Nic Cage were the only ones who could age backwards!
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00:00Hollywood is the land of the immortal, but while many of our favorite actors seem to
00:05have cut a deal with further time, none of them have yet found a way to wind the clock backwards.
00:10And that's where movie magic comes in, because while actors may not be able to do it themselves,
00:16VFX wizards certainly can. I'm Ewan, you're watching WhatCulture,
00:21and here are 10 actors who were de-aged for movie roles.
00:2410. Paul Reubens – Pee Wee's Big Holiday
00:28Pee Wee's Big Holiday proves that has-been comedy characters can make a bold,
00:33road-trip-shaped return to the big screen and still come up trumps, despite what Mr.
00:38Bean's Holiday has to say about it. But it couldn't have been done without Pee Wee actor himself,
00:43Paul Reubens, committing to the bit. Reprising his role as quirky oddball Pee Wee Herman nearly
00:49three decades on from the last cinematic appearance of his character in Big Top Pee Wee from 1988,
00:56the sadly now departed Reubens had to look the part. Rather than take the sad and broken old
01:02man Indiana Jones and Obi-Wan approach, director John Lee would settle for nothing less than the
01:08original Pee Wee on full, youthful, flexible form. Reubens certainly still had that slapstick sensibility
01:15and the physicality to match, but his face told a different story. Even on someone as preternaturally
01:22youthful as he, with 30 years between outings, there were always going to be noticeable differences
01:27in appearance. To combat some of the lines, wrinkles, and general lifewear, the actor was de-aged and
01:34de-wrinkled digitally in post-production, with it taking the effects team around five months to edit
01:39the then 63-year-old's appearance in every single frame of footage. But it's hard to argue with the
01:45subtle and pretty much seamless results. 9. Will Smith, Gemini Man
01:51Gemini Man achieved a cinematic first by pitting Will Smith against Will Smith,
01:56in what winds up as a battle royale rather than a battle of ego. Former marine scout sniper turned
02:03assassin Henry, played by Smith, is hunted on the eve of his retirement by a boyish clone of himself
02:09known as Junior, also portrayed by Smith, sent by the organization he was seeking to leave.
02:15Rather than using the tied and tested tricks of the trade to shoot Smith in both roles,
02:20such as doubles, camera tricks, and mashing up shots with split screens like JCVD did on more than one
02:26occasion, director Ang Lee took a more novel approach. Lee and his VFX team used avatar-style
02:34performance capture from Smith in order to create a digitally rendered younger clone of his character,
02:39rather than working on top of his existing performance. This freed up the production from
02:44all the trappings of an actor playing two characters and allowed a greater scope for what Lee could do with
02:49his blocking, staging, and camera work. 8. Jeff Bridges, Tron Legacy
02:55As us being the first feature film to put an entirely CGI-rendered scene on our screens,
03:01the original Tron introduced audiences to the possibilities of virtual reality and gave the
03:06ever-charismatic Jeff Bridges, who stars as Kevin Flynn, a computer programmer and game developer who
03:12finds himself transported into the digital landscape of his computer, a much-needed boost in Hollywood.
03:18But the big man wasn't done yet, returning in Tron Legacy as both Kevin and his younger,
03:24evil digital self Clue from the first movie, Bridges was able to step back into both pairs
03:30of boots thanks to some savvy VFX work. While the first big Hollywood movies to use this kind of
03:35de-aging tech had a major role, as well as the first to have an actor play opposite the younger
03:40version of himself, Tron Legacy brought two full-fleshed characters to the screen via a full-service
03:46digital workover. The VFX team made Bridges look 35 again by recording the star's facial movements and
03:53superimposing them onto a digital model of his younger self. While the end product looks pretty
03:59good for 2010 and helped move the technology along that bit further, it is nonetheless unfortunate that
04:05similarly painstaking work was not done on Bridges' voiceover. After all, it's hard to suspend
04:11disbelief when there's a 61-year-old voice cutting out of a 35-year-old face, the same reason that the
04:17opening of Indiana Jones and the Dialed Destiny also felt very weird.
04:227. Jennifer Connelly – American Pastoral
04:26Adapting the novels of the late great Philip Roth has never been easy. Many have tried,
04:32many have failed, and director and star Ewan McGregor's American Pastoral is closer to the latter.
04:39Starring as a family torn apart by one major, life-changing, community-shattering event,
04:44McGregor and Jennifer Connelly star as all-American couple Seymour and Dawn Levov. And it was no
04:51small task for either actor taking on roles that span from the pair's young courting days
04:55all the way up to the miserable in-film present of 1996, inhabiting these characters through every
05:02stage of their lives. For Connelly's role as Dawn, who is a young beauty pageant contestant when the
05:08couple first meet, the VFX team aimed to de-age her by 25 years, so that she would appear similar to
05:14how she did in 1991's The Rocketeer, filmed when the actress was just 19. To achieve this,
05:20they digitally enhanced her face to make it look more full, rounding her cheeks and jaw,
05:25and smoothing out some of her skin. Pared with the 1950s setting, styling, and soft tones,
05:30the effect managed to look pretty natural, and was a rare win in a film that was otherwise dead on arrival.
05:366. Bruce Willis, Surrogates
05:40Set in the near future, Surrogates builds a world in which people are freed from pain and danger
05:45by living through robotic avatars of themselves called, you guessed it, Surrogates. FBI agent Greer,
05:52played by Bruce Willis, is one such vicarious operator. But when a murder shakes the supposedly
05:58perfect society to its core, uncovering a sinister conspiracy, he has to ditch his surrogate and raw
06:05dog reality in order to get to the bottom of it. With such a killer concept, not just any old effects
06:11would do, and industrial light and magic were brought on board with a smattering of other
06:15digital effects outfits, creating amongst themselves a second, younger version of the actor
06:21that audiences could really get behind. To make the then 50-year-old Bruce Willis into a young,
06:26fresh-faced surrogate robot, the hair and makeup team went ham on the practical effects, before the
06:32digital team took over in post and gave what VFX supervisor Mark Stetson described as a digital
06:38facelift. Unfortunately, too much of the attention went to the film's visual style, and not enough to
06:44the script, which winds up being predictable, forgettable, and not nearly worthy of the work
06:50and talent that went in elsewhere. 5. Shah Rukh Khan
06:55Hindi-language action-thriller Fan stars Shah Rukh Khan in a dual role as Bollywood actor
07:01Aryan Khanna, as well as obsessed fan-conventional stalker Gwarav Chandidhar, who looks like a younger
07:07version of him and uses his likeness to his advantage. Appropriately enough, the film operates
07:13as a kind of poisoned letter to Bollywood that places Khan on a pedestal and then uses his opposite
07:19to criticize the culture, the status, and the sensationalism that is such a big part of the
07:24scene. Rather than drafting a relative or another actor who looks enough like Khan to sell the Gwarav
07:30part, the actor was signed on with the intention of playing both roles himself. Director Manish Sharma
07:36and his team used prosthetics in scene, filming the required shots with two performances from Khan
07:41before taking the footage to the effects lab for further post-production work. To achieve a convincing
07:47effect, they used a process of 3D scanning on the actor and then layered the effects to iron out
07:52the actor's lines and wrinkles, add some baby fat to his face, and slim his brain down, taking away
07:58muscle mass from the arms, waist, and shoulders. The effects are impressive and serve the film
08:04precisely as they are meant to, often prompting us to forget we're not watching two different people.
08:09Number 4. Isabelle Furman
08:12Orphan First Kill Proceeding the events of the first orphan film,
08:16First Kill has the pint-sized Esther, played by Isabelle Furman, escape from a psychiatric ward
08:22in Estonia, hoping to carve out a new life for herself. Having killed guards and therapists and
08:27whoever else she can lay her tiny hands on, Esther makes her way to the US in pursuit of the American
08:33dream to impersonate the missing presumed dead daughter of a wealthy family until such a time comes as
08:39she can dispose of them and inherit their stash. It's just what we all aspire to do.
08:45Having played an adult pretending to be a child whilst a child in the first film,
08:50Furman returned from the orphan prequel as an adult to play an even younger adult pretending to be a
08:56child. Ugh! Rather than use expensive digital de-aging technology for this outing, which financiers
09:03were unlikely to approve for a non-blockbuster horror, director William Brent Bell went back
09:08to basics. He used all the tricks in the book, relying on tactful makeup and clothing choices
09:14on the then 25-year-old Furman, platform shoes for the supporting cast, false perspective,
09:19and other old-fashioned movie magic techniques to make the lead appear significantly smaller and younger
09:25in every scene. Want to know how it's done though? It's hard to look at some of the movie scenes the same
09:30way ever again. Number 3. Brad Pitt The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
09:37The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, David Fincher's most mawkish film to date,
09:41put Brad Pitt in the ultimate anti-Tyler Durden role as an old, frail, and kindly New Orleans gent
09:48who ages in reverse. As the story progresses, Benjamin's life weaves in and out of sync with
09:54that of Daisy's, played by Cate Blanchett, a dancer whom he can never quite meet at the right
09:59moment for the romance to find its focal point, despite aging backwards through every rugged
10:04stage of Pitt we've ever seen on screen. Fincher's digital, practical, hair, and makeup teams worked
10:10in unison to de-age Pitt throughout the film, utilizing their different skills depending on
10:15what stage the character was at. This meant wigs, prosthetics, and age-appropriate clothing,
10:20but also a whole lot of VFX on top of his performance, using layers developed on live casts of
10:26the actor's face that were scanned into the computers and used to gradually de-age him.
10:31Of course, this couldn't have been sold to audiences without a serious shift from Pitt,
10:36and the actor pulled all of his experience to imbue the various on-screen ages with the right
10:41posture, mannerisms, energy, and sense of flexibility. Benjamin goes from old-timer to young
10:47boy before our eyes in a gradual transition that is startling, seamless, and yes, sometimes even
10:53wordy the tears it attempts to provoke. 2. Ian McDermid – Star Wars Episode I – The Phantom Menace
11:01Darth Vader may be the poster boy for the saga, but what is Star Wars without its most dastardly of
11:07villains? The Emperor, or Sheev as he's known to his friends. Providing the impetus for pretty much
11:13every bad thing that happens across the nine Skywalker Saga films, Palpatine is the sinister puppet
11:20master, skulking in the shadows and controlling the action from a distance. And given his hideous
11:26and deformed face, it's probably a wise choice on this part. Despite having last played the character
11:3216 years previously in Episode 6, Ian McDermid returned to play Sheev Palpatine in the first
11:38entry of the prequel trilogy, the now 25-year-old Phantom Menace as a relatively fresh-faced senator of
11:45the Republic. And he did it with no makeup, no digital effects, no nothing. In a moment of
11:51pure serendipity, the actor's real age aligned with the younger characters at the exact right time,
11:57making him age backwards on screen and providing one of the most seamless prequel movie character
12:03continuities we've ever seen. 1. Robert De Niro – The Irishman
12:09In a then-unprecedented move, Netflix gave New York auteur Martin Scorsese a blank paycheck to make
12:16his epic real-life gangster movie The Irishman, which to me is still one of his absolute best.
12:22In order to tell the story of truck driver Frank Sheeran, whose involvement with a
12:26Pennsylvanian crime family leads him to become a hitman and fixer working for the teamster Jimmy Hoffa,
12:32Scorsese insisted on using the same actors from beginning to end. Rather than taking the tried and
12:37tested route of swapping out the part to fit the age. It would seem to make sense, then,
12:42potentially, to choose a middle-aged cast, who could conceivably play all stages of the characters
12:47without too much trouble. A little makeup here, a little de-aging there, but no. Scorsese assembled
12:54a hefty squad of his old favorites, with Robert De Niro front and center as Frank. Employing a ridiculously
13:00expensive and previously unexplored motion capture technology, the team, led by ILM once again,
13:06enabled De Niro to play the mob assassin throughout the entirety of The Irishman.
13:10The digital de-aging process allowed De Niro and the other actors to be filmed on camera
13:15as they normally would, without the sort of rigging or visual impediments this kind of technology
13:21usually calls for. The actors were coached on how to walk, move, gesture, and carry themselves like
13:26younger men, and their voices were edited in post-production. And you know what? They just about
13:32got away with it, too. Either way, great movie. Love that one.
Recommended
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