Romulus’ Relates to SAG-AFTRA’s Digital Replicas Work

The late Ian Holm — who played the role of android Ash, an antagonist in 1979’s “Alien” — has generated plenty of attention with his return in Disney and 20th Century’s “Alien: Romulus,” which over the weekend extended its box office tally to $91 million domestically and $283.5 million worldwide. 

Holm’s appearance in the latest “Alien” installment underscores the role of the SAG-AFTRA collective bargaining agreement, which requires that the performer’s estate grant consent before a digital replica is created.

A recent Visual Effects Society panel explored the delicate work to bring Holm’s likeness to “Alien: Romulus,” which introduces the late actor as a new android named Rook. Director Fede Alvarez confirmed that the filmmakers first contacted Holm’s estate for its OK (as Variety understands it, this involved compensation, per the SAG-AFTRA contract) before embarking on using Holm’s likeness.

The creative approach was different from that of other late actors that were brought back to the big screen with digital trickery, including appearances of the late Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and late Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in the “Star Wars” franchise. In the case of “Alien: Romulus,” rather than showing a complete human, Holm’s Rook is a malfunctioning android whose damaged head and upper body is propped up on a table. Like much of the work in the movie, the team aimed to create Rook by combining traditional techniques and new cutting edge techniques, in doing so, marrying the practical with the digital.

Legacy Effects supervisor Shane Mahan related that the VFX team was unable to locate an original head cast of the English actor from “Alien” archives, but they did track down one that was created in the late ‘90s when Holm played the role of Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” films. Mahan, who led the building of an animatronic of Holm and the alien creatures, admitted that while the aforementioned head cast wasn’t created with Holm at the same age as needed, “it gave us the proportions of his ears and his nose and his mouth.”

Production VFX supervisor Eric Barba added that 4K scans of the original film were a useful guide in creating the performance and also gave them training data, as the digital work including the use of AI-enabled techniques from startup Metaphysic. “They were able to retarget the eyes, to fix the eye lines,” explained Barba. “Their tools are fantastic for us to be able to … really kind of direct the performance.”

Creating or augmenting actors in the digital realm has been done of other reasons, including in a rare, delicate situation of finishing a film when an actor died during the time that the movie was filming, such as was the case with Paul Walker on “Furious 7”; or for de-aging to meet story requirements, such as Robert DeNiro and other actors in “The Irishman.” Approval of the work by the actor or estate is decided on a case by case basis.

“Our policy work includes ensuring consent by estates for uses of digital replicas into expressive works, like films, and the No Fakes Act in the U.S. Senate directly address this issue,” summed up Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, national executive director and chief negotiator of SAG-AFTRA.

In an email to Variety, he added that “basic contract protections for AI are so important and why we are striking to achieve comparable protections for video game performers … This is why it is imperative that we get basic protections in the law for the protection of voice and likeness in expressive works.”