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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 work over. The VFX team made Bridges look 35 again by recording the star's facial movements
03:53and superimposing 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 disbelief
04:12when there's a 61-year-old voice cutting out of a 35-year-old face. The same reason that the opening
04:18of 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.
04:38Starring 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 small
04:51task for either actor taking on roles that span from the pair's young courting days all the way up
04:56to the miserable in-film present of 1996, inhabiting these characters through every stage of their
05:03lives. For Connelly's role as Dawn, who is a young beauty pageant contestant when the couple first meet,
05:09the VFX team aimed to de-age her by 25 years, so that she would appear similar to how she did in 1991's
05:16The Rocketeer, filmed when the actress was just 19. To achieve this, they digitally enhanced her face
05:22to make it look more full, rounding her cheeks and jaw, and smoothing out some of her skin. Pared
05:27with the 1950s setting, styling, and soft tones, the effect managed to look pretty natural and was
05:33a rare win in a film that was otherwise dead on arrival. 6. 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
05:52Greer, played by Bruce Willis, is one such vicarious operator. But when a murder shakes the
05:58supposedly perfect society to its core, uncovering a sinister conspiracy, he has to ditch his surrogate
06:04and raw dog reality in order to get to the bottom of it. With such a killer concept, not just any old
06:11effects would 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,
06:32before the digital team took over in post and gave what VFX supervisor Mark Stetson described
06:37as a digital facelift. Unfortunately, too much of the attention went to the film's visual style,
06:43and not enough to the script, which winds up being predictable, forgettable,
06:48and not nearly worthy of the work and talent that went in elsewhere.
06:52Number 5. Shah Rukh Khan – Fan
06:56Hindi-language action-thriller Fan stars Shah Rukh Khan in a dual role as Bollywood actor
07:01Aryan Khanna, as well as his obsessed fan-conventional stalker Gwarav Chandidhar,
07:06who looks like a younger version of him and uses his likeness to his advantage.
07:11Appropriately enough, the film operates as a kind of poisoned letter to Bollywood
07:16that places Khan on a pedestal and then uses his opposite to criticize the culture,
07:20the status, and the sensationalism that is such a big part of the scene.
07:25Rather than drafting a relative or another actor who looks enough like Khan to sell the Gwarav part,
07:30the actor was signed on with the intention of playing both roles himself.
07:35Director Manish Sharma and his team used prosthetics in scene,
07:38filming the required shots with two performances from Khan,
07:41before taking the footage to the effects lab for further post-production work.
07:46To achieve a convincing effect, they used a process of 3D scanning on the actor,
07:50and then layered VFX to iron out the actor's lines and wrinkles,
07:54add some baby fat to his face, and slim his brain down,
07:58taking away muscle mass from the arms, waist, and shoulders.
08:01The effects are impressive and serve the film precisely as they are meant to,
08:06often prompting us to forget we're not watching two different people.
08:09Number 4.
08:10Isabelle Furman – First Kill
08:13Proceeding the events of the first orphan film,
08:16First Kill has the pint-sized Esther, played by Isabelle Furman,
08:20escape from a psychiatric ward in Estonia, hoping to carve out a new life for herself.
08:25Having killed guards and therapists and whoever else she can lay her tiny hands on,
08:30Esther makes her way to the US in pursuit of the American dream,
08:34to impersonate the missing presumed dead daughter of a wealthy family,
08:37until such a time comes as she can dispose of them and inherit their stash.
08:42It'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,
08:49Furman returned from the orphan prequel as an adult to play an even younger adult pretending to be a child.
08:57Rather than use expensive digital de-aging technology for this outing,
09:01which financiers were unlikely to approve for a non-blockbuster horror,
09:06director William Brent Bell went back to basics.
09:09He used all the tricks in the book, relying on tactful makeup and clothing choices on the then 25-year-old
09:16Furman, platform shoes for the supporting cast, false perspective and other old-fashioned movie
09:21magic techniques to make the lead appear significantly smaller and younger in every scene.
09:27Once you know how it's done though, it's hard to look at some of the movie scenes the same way ever again.
09:32Number 3.
09:33Brad Pitt – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
09:36The 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 who ages in reverse.
09:50As the story progresses, Benjamin's life weaves in and out of sync with that of Daisy's, played by Cate Blanchett,
09:56a dancer whom he can never quite meet at the right moment for their romance to find its focal point,
10:02despite aging backwards through every rugged stage of Pitt we've ever seen on screen.
10:07Fincher's digital, practical, hair, and makeup teams worked in unison to de-age Pitt throughout the film,
10:13utilizing their different skills depending on what stage the character was at.
10:17This meant wigs, prosthetics, and age-appropriate clothing, but also a whole lot of VFX on top of his
10:23performance, using layers developed on live casts of the actor's face that were scanned into the
10:28computers and used to gradually de-age him. Of course, this couldn't have been sold to audiences
10:33without a serious shift from Pitt, and the actor pulled all of his experience to imbue the various
10:39on-screen ages with the right posture, mannerisms, energy, and sense of flexibility. Benjamin goes from
10:46old-timer to young boy before our eyes in a gradual transition that is startling, seamless, and yes,
10:52sometimes even wordy the tears it attempts to provoke.
10:562. 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
11:19puppet master, skulking in the shadows and controlling the action from a distance. And given his hideous and
11:26deformed face, it's probably a wise choice on his part. Despite having last played the character 16
11:33years previously in Episode 6, Ian McDermid returned to play Sheev Palpatine in the first entry of the
11:39prequel trilogy, the now 25-year-old Phantom Menace, as a relatively fresh-faced senator of the Republic.
11:45And he did it with no makeup, no digital effects, no nothing. In a moment of pure serendipity,
11:52the actor's real age aligned with the younger characters at the exact right time, making him
11:58age 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
12:31Hoffer, Scorsese insisted on using the same actors from beginning to end, rather than taking the tried
12:37and tested 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
13:00ridiculously expensive and previously unexplored motion capture technology, the team, led by ILM
13:06once again, enabled De Niro to play the mob assassin throughout the entirety of The Irishman. The digital
13:11de-aging process allowed De Niro and the other actors to be filmed on camera as they normally
13:16would, without the sort of rigging or visual impediments this kind of technology usually calls
13:21for. The actors were coached on how to walk, move, gesture, and carry themselves like younger men,
13:27and their voices were edited in post-production. And you know what? They just about got away with it,
13:32too. Either way, great movie. Love that one.
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