It was 2018, and the crew at the New Zealand–based visual effects studio Weta Digital was hard at work manufacturing Hollywood’s hottest new talent, ahead of his big-screen debut a year later. He’s a new species of actor, with unswerving focus, superhuman strength, and total commitment to the role. He doesn’t take breaks or require the services of hair and makeup. And he doesn’t need a trailer, since he lives on a hard drive. They call him Junior or, sometimes, “the asset”: the most ambitious computer-generated human ever made for a movie. He’s also the spitting image of a 23-year-old Will Smith.
In June of this year, in a post-production facility in Manhattan, a crew member shows off the nearly complete asset. Up onscreen is a shot of the real-life, 49-year-old Will Smith as he looked on the set of Gemini Man, wearing a facial-capture headset, his face and neck specked with tracking dots. The film, set to be released in October, is a sci-fi action thriller directed by Ang Lee that follows a retired assassin, Henry (Will Smith), who finds himself in the sniper-scope sights of another, younger assassin (digital Will Smith), who has been forged out of Henry’s own DNA. It’s a story of a man trying to outwit himself, of weather-worn wisdom pitted against cocky youth. It’s also a cautionary tale about humans hubristically meddling with awesome tech.
This story is from the October 2019 edition of WIRED.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the October 2019 edition of WIRED.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Women at the Bottom of the World
They go to Antarctica with dreams of studying the unknown. What they discover there is the stuff of nightmares.
RUSSIAN, GO HOME
WHEN MY COUNTRY WENT TO WAR, I FACED A CHOICE: Flee to a world where the truth might kill me - or seek peace in censored oblivion.
The Fateful Eight
THE STORY BEHIND THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL TECHNOLOGICAL PAPER IN RECENT HISTORY.
Can the Internet's Greatest Authenticity Machine Survive Wall Street?
When thousands of subreddits went dark in protest last summer, it exposed the tension at the core of Reddit - on the eve of the company's IPO. Now that synthetic media is flooding the internet, does the web's most reliably human forum represent a gold mine for investors, or an old-fashioned dumpster fire?
The Unnerving Presence of Javier Bardem
He's known for playing fanatics and murderous psychopaths. In real life, he loves his wife (and Brad Pitt) and cries during E.T.
HAPPY HAUNTING
IN A CHARMING game called This Discord Has Ghosts in It, up to 15 participants at a time gather in a Discord server that has been reimagined as a haunted house. (Of course.) Inside lies a maze of (chat) rooms where each player takes the role of either an eponymous spirit or a paranormal investigator.
THE MYTH OF METAL
How I became a Python programmer - and learned to love our abstract world.
SO YOU WANT TO REWIRE BRAINS
There's a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIS help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs.
FOR GIANT LIZARDS, PLEASE HOLD
The sounds of Slack have a secret history.
THE NERD-KING VIBES OF JENSEN HUANG
The Nvidia CEO turned a graphics-card company into a trillion-dollar AI behemoth. Now he wants to transform the rest of the world-health care, robotics, autonomous driving, the works.