CBS News reported that AI in Hollywood has reached a new threshold as actor Val Kilmer, who died in April 2025 at 65, appears in over an hour of finished footage in the upcoming film As Deep as the Grave through state-of-the-art generative AI, constructed from archival material his family provided and executed under SAG guidelines with compensation paid to his estate.
Summary
- Kilmer was cast as Father Fintan, a Catholic priest and Native American spiritualist, five years before his death but was too ill from throat cancer to shoot any scenes, leading director Coerte Voorhees to pursue a generative AI performance with full family cooperation.
- His daughter Mercedes Kilmer supplied archival images and supported the project, saying her father “always looked at emerging technologies with optimism as a tool to expand the possibilities of storytelling.”
- The film’s trailer debuted at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on April 15, 2026, with the ensemble cast also including Tom Felton, Abigail Lawrie, Abigail Breslin, and Wes Studi.
AI in Hollywood reached a defining moment at CinemaCon in Las Vegas this week when the trailer for As Deep as the Grave showed Val Kilmer performing across multiple ages, appearing as a spectral figure at one point and as a younger man in his thirties at another. Kilmer had signed on to play Father Fintan five years before his death but never filmed a single scene. Director Coerte Voorhees chose to reconstruct his performance digitally rather than recast the role.
The production used images of Kilmer at various stages of his life alongside audio recordings from his later years, when his voice had been permanently altered by a tracheotomy following his throat cancer diagnosis. That detail aligned naturally with the character, who suffers from tuberculosis in the film. Voorhees said he deliberately chose Kilmer’s post-surgery voice because it matched what the character would sound like.
Kilmer’s daughter Mercedes and son Jack both supported the project, with Mercedes taking an active role in providing archival material and giving legal authorization for the digital replica. The estate received financial compensation under the terms SAG guidelines require for posthumous digital replicas. “He always looked at emerging technologies with optimism as a tool to expand the possibilities of storytelling,” Mercedes Kilmer said in a statement.
Kilmer had already embraced AI voice technology during his lifetime. For Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, his voice was reconstructed by the AI platform Sonantic using archival audio he personally provided, after his cancer destroyed his natural speaking voice. He called that experience “an incredibly special gift.” That prior participation reinforced the argument that the posthumous AI performance reflected his own values.
The Broader Debate It Reopens
Not everyone agrees that family consent resolves the ethical questions. SAG’s 2023 and 2024 strike negotiations centered specifically on preventing studios from replicating actors without consent or fair compensation. The As Deep as the Grave production argues it satisfies both conditions. Critics, including some who commented when the trailer dropped, argue the existence of a willing family exception creates a template that could be stretched into cases where an actor’s own wishes were ambiguous.
Voorhees addressed the criticism directly: “Despite the fact some people might call it controversial, this is what Val wanted.”
What It Signals for the AI Sector
Each well-publicized AI entertainment milestone simultaneously serves as proof of generative AI’s commercial utility and as a catalyst for the regulatory attention that will define what the technology is ultimately permitted to do. For the AI tokens market and the broader AI bubble debate, cases like this one matter because they determine the social license within which generative AI companies operate, which in turn shapes the legislative environment that governs their products and the infrastructure investments they require.
