When brothers Coerte and John Voorhees completed their latest film, As Deep as the Grave, they felt it was incomplete. That’s because, in many ways, it was.
One of the roles in the film had been written for the Hollywood star Val Kilmer, known for portraying Iceman in Top Gun and Bruce Wayne in Batman Forever.
Mr Kilmer’s cancer diagnosis forced him to abandon the project and he died soon after in April 2025.
But now, using generative AI tools, a digital replica of Mr Kilmer has been added into the movie.
The AI-generated likeness was created from a trove of videos, images and audio recorded before Mr Kilmer’s death.
The star died from throat cancer in 2024 – Mark Humphrey
His family provided images of his younger self and and footage from his final years to create the character, which is based on a real-life Catholic priest and Native American spiritualist.
“He was the actor I wanted to play this role,” Coerte Voorhees, the film’s writer and director, told Variety. “It was very much designed around him. It drew on his Native American heritage and his ties to and love of the Southwest.”
Voorhees added: “I was looking at a call sheet the other day, and we had him ready to shoot. He was just going through a really, really tough time medically, and he couldn’t do it.”
Mr Kilmer’s daughter Mercedes told The New York Times that her father “always looked at emerging technologies with optimism as a tool to expand the possibilities of storytelling… This spirit is something that we are all honoring within this specific film, of which he was an integral part.”
Kilmer in Top Gun with Tom Cruise – FlixPix / Alamy Stock Photo
Mr Vorhees acknowledged that some people might consider the move controversial, but insisted “this is what Val wanted.”
“His family kept saying how important they thought the movie was and that Val really wanted to be a part of this,” he said.
“He really thought it was an important story that he wanted his name on. It was that support that gave me the confidence to say, ‘Okay, let’s do this’.”
As Deep As the Grave is the true story of archaeologists from the Southwest of America, Ann and Earl Morris.
It explores their effort to trace the history of the Navajo people and depicts their excavations in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona.
The film, which is currently in postproduction, is set to be released sometime in 2026 after being delayed by the Covid pandemic, which stretched production to six years.
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