Harrison Ford
Actor
Star of Star Wars and Indiana Jones who approved and publicly defended ILM’s AI-assisted de-aging of him in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: “That is my actual face. At that age.”
In his words
That is my actual face. At that age. They have this artificial intelligence program. It can go through every foot of film Lucasfilm owns, because I did a bunch of movies for them.
I think it’s not a question of the technology, it’s how you use it.
Biography
Harrison Ford (born 1942) is among the most bankable stars in film history — Han Solo in Star Wars, the title role in five Indiana Jones films, plus Blade Runner, Witness, and The Fugitive.
Approving his own de-aging
For the 25-minute 1944-set prologue of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023), Industrial Light & Magic de-aged the then-80-year-old Ford by roughly 35 years using its FaceSwap toolkit — a blend of machine learning trained on every frame of Ford in Lucasfilm’s archive and the handiwork of more than 100 VFX artists.
Ford championed the result on the record. At Cannes he said the technology “seems very realistic and I know that that is my face,” adding, “It’s not a kind of Photoshop magic — that’s what I looked like 35 years ago.” On Stephen Colbert’s show he marveled at the AI program mining Lucasfilm’s film archive. Pressed on the wider debate, he offered a pragmatist’s creed: when the technology is helpful he is happy to have it, and when it is not, he is disappointed it was used — the question is not the tool but the use.
His endorsement came weeks before the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike put digital replicas at the center of Hollywood’s labor fight — making Ford a notable counterexample: an A-lister who consented, was paid, and liked the result, even as SAG-AFTRA fought for guardrails covering performers with less power.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/harrison-ford