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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 Pee Wee's Big Holiday proves that has-been comedy
00:31characters can make a bold, road-trip-shaped return to the big screen and still come up trumps,
00:37despite what Mr. Bean's Holiday has to say about it. But it couldn't have been done without Pee Wee
00:43actor himself, Paul Reubens, committing to the bit. Reprising his role as quirky oddball Pee Wee Herman
00:49nearly three decades on from the last cinematic appearance of his character in Big Top Pee Wee
00:54from 1988, the sadly now departed Reubens had to look the part. Rather than take the sad and broken
01:02old man 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
01:21preternaturally youthful as he, with 30 years between outings, there were always going to be
01:26noticeable differences in appearance. To combat some of the lines, wrinkles, and general lifewear,
01:32the actor was de-aged and de-wrinkled digitally in post-production, with it taking the effects team
01:38around five months to edit the then 63-year-old's appearance in every single frame of footage.
01:44But it's hard to argue with the subtle and pretty much seamless results.
01:489. Will Smith
01:50Gemini 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
02:27occasion, 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.
02:528. Jeff Bridges
02:54Tron Legacy As us being the first feature film to put an entirely
02:59CGI-rendered scene on our screens, the original Tron introduced audiences to the possibilities of
03:04virtual reality and gave the ever-charismatic Jeff Bridges, who stars as Kevin Flynn, a computer
03:10programmer and game developer who finds himself transported into the digital landscape of his
03:15computer, a much-needed boost in Hollywood. But the big man wasn't done yet, returning in Tron
03:22Legacy as both Kevin and his younger, evil digital self Clue from the first movie, Bridges was able to
03:28step back into both pairs of boots thanks to some savvy VFX work. While the first big Hollywood movie
03:34used to use this kind of de-aging tech in a major role, as well as the first to have
03:38an actor play
03:39opposite the younger version of himself, Tron Legacy brought two full-fleshed characters to the screen
03:45via a full-service digital workover. The VFX team made Bridges look 35 again by recording the
03:52star's facial movements and superimposing them onto a digital model of his younger self. While the
03:58end product looks pretty good for 2010 and helped move the technology along that bit further, it is
04:03nonetheless unfortunate that similarly painstaking work was not done on Bridges' voiceover. After
04:10all, it's hard to suspend disbelief when there's a 61-year-old voice cutting out of a 35-year-old
04:16face. The same reason that the opening of Indiana Jones and the Dialed Destiny also felt very weird.
04:22Number 7. Jennifer Connolly, American Pastoral
04:26Adapting the novels of the late great Philip Roth has never been easy. Many have tried, many have failed,
04:32and director and star Ewan McGregor's American Pastoral is closer to the latter. Starring as a
04:40family torn apart by one major life-changing community-shattering event, McGregor and Jennifer
04:45Connolly star as an all-American couple Seymour and Dawn Levov. And it was no small task for either
04:52actor taking on roles that span from the pair's young courting days all the way up to the miserable
04:57in-film present of 1996, inhabiting these characters through every stage of their lives.
05:04But Connolly'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
05:15did in 1991's
05:16The Rocketeer, filmed when the actress was just 19. To achieve this, they digitally enhanced her face to
05:22make it look more full, rounding her cheeks and jaw and smoothing out some of her skin. Paired with the
05:271950s setting, styling, and soft tones, the effect managed to look pretty natural and was a rare win
05:34in a film that was otherwise dead on arrival. Number 6. Bruce Willis, Surrogates
05:40Set in the near future, Surrogates builds a world in which people are freed from pain and danger by
05:45living 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
06:10any 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,
06:27fresh-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,
06:44and 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.
06:525. Shah Rukh Khan – Fan
06:55Hindi-language action thriller Fan stars Shah Rukh Khan in a dual role as Bollywood actor
07:01Aryan Kana, as well as his 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 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, filming the required shots with two
07:40performances from Khan before 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 led VFX to iron out the actor's lines and wrinkles, add some baby fat to his face,
07:56and slim his brain down, taking 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. Isabelle Furman – First Kill
08:13Proceeding the events of the first orphan film, First Kill has the pint-sized Esther, played by Isabelle
08:19Furman, escape 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, to impersonate the missing,
08:35presumed dead daughter of a wealthy family until such a time comes as she can dispose of them
08:40and inherit their stash. It's just what we all aspire to do. Having played an adult pretending to be a
08:47child whilst a child in the first film, Furman returned from the orphan prequel as an adult to play
08:53an even younger adult pretending to be a child. Ugh!
08:57Rather 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 to basics.
09:09He used all the tricks in the book, relying on tactful makeup and clothing choices on the then 25-year
09:16-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.
09:26Want to know how it's done though? It's hard to look at some of the movie scenes the same way
09:31ever again.
09:32Number 3. Brad Pitt – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
09:37The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, David Fincher's most mawkish film to date,
09:42put 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 moment for
09:59that romance to find its focal point, despite aging backwards through every rugged stage of Pitt
10:05we've ever seen on screen. Fincher's digital, practical, hair, and makeup teams worked in unison
10:11to de-age Pitt throughout the film, utilizing their different skills depending on what stage the
10:16character was at. This meant wigs, prosthetics, and age-appropriate clothing, but also a whole lot
10:22of VFX on top of his performance, using layers developed on live casts of the actor's face that
10:28were scanned into the computers and used to gradually de-age him. Of course, this couldn't have been
10:32sold to audiences without a serious shift from Pitt, and the actor pulled all of his experience to
10:38imbue the various on-screen ages with the right posture, mannerisms, energy, and sense of flexibility.
10:45Benjamin goes from old-timer to young boy before our eyes in a gradual transition that is startling,
10:51seamless, and yes, sometimes even worthy of 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 puppet
11:20master, 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,
11:53the 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 continuities
12:04we've ever seen. 1. Robert De Niro – The Irishman
12:08In 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 as they
13:16normally would, 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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