How Hollywood Became Obsessed With De-aging Its Stars

Guy Williams and his fellow visual-effects artists have spent so much time staring at Will Smith’s face, they’ve practically memorized his every pore.

“We joke sometimes that we probably know his face better than his wife does,” Williams told me in September, laughing. “I can tell you exactly how he forms a smile. I can even tell you the 12 different flavors of Will Smith’s smile and the subtleties of each one. It gets pretty obnoxious.”

Becoming this intimate with the actor’s visage was an occupational hazard for Williams, a visual-effects supervisor for Gemini Man, Ang Lee’s sci-fi thriller about a retiring hitman battling his younger clone. Williams and his team at the digital-effects studio Weta were tasked with helping to create a version of Smith in his early 20s that could believably interact with his 51-year-old self on-screen. Together with another visual-effects supervisor, Bill Westenhofer, Williams and hundreds of artists tracked the actor’s movements on set and studied his previous work to build Junior, a digital human who resembles era Smith. Westenhofer told me to think of Junior as ’s version of Gollum from , the type of CGI creature molded by digital artists but rooted in an actor’s work. “The essence of what you see is what Will brought to the set,” he explained. “We created the digital person, but the choices [Junior] made were Will’s.”