The Game-Changing Tech Behind Gemini Man's ‘Young' Will Smith

The film’s f/x artists tried to create, with pure data, a shockingly realistic 23-year-old Will Smith. Their true aim: to finally cross the uncanny valley.

- Darryn King

ANOTHER DAY IN THE LABORATORY, and all was quiet apart from the scritch scratch of styluses on graphics tablets. On dozens of screens, glowing in the low light, were the various components of a human body: the dislocated sphere of an eyeball, the strange topography of skin in extreme close-up, a thicket of sprouting hair follicles. At one particular coffee-cup-strewn workstation, an artist studied the essence, the key to the team’s efforts – a clip of the ‘90s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

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.