Thanks to his long, illustrious, and admittedly inconsistent relationship with the sci-fi genre that dates back well over 30 years, Keanu Reeves knows a thing or two about dystopian hellscapes and terrifying futures where humanity has been usurped by the rise of the machines.
As a result, the actor isn’t entirely on board with the recent trend of de-aging and deepfaking actors to repurpose their likenesses for a variety of reasons, to the extent that he’s had it written into his contract that his ageless visage can never be repurposed for means that the wholesome hero deems to be nefarious.
In an interview with Wired, The Matrix veteran shared his thoughts on the process, which instantly gave him a feeling of unease.
“They added a tear to my face, and I was just like, ‘Huh?!’ It was like, ‘I don’t even have to be here.’ What’s frustrating about that is you lose your agency. When you give a performance in a film, you know you’re going to be edited, but you’re participating in that. If you go into deepfake land, it has none of your points of view. That’s scary. It’s going to be interesting to see how humans deal with these technologies.”
The good news is that due to his status as an immortal, there’s probably going to be no need to deepfake or bring his age down by a few years in any upcoming projects, unless Lionsgate gets so carried away with expanding the John Wick universe that the studio tries to convince him that a digital paint job could allow him to star in an origin story prequel, but let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.