Kevin O'Leary kinda sorta changes tune on AI actors

This comes from a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, in which O’Leary suggests that his comments about extras were taken out of context. “I remember doing shoots back in 1984 in arenas where we put cutouts in the seats… They did that in Ben-Hur. You didn’t make people sit there for 16 hours. Today, I think we would do that with AI and it would be the same thing.” That being said, it sounds like O’Leary sort of came around to the understanding that having real people fill the smaller parts still makes a difference that can’t be replicated with an algorithm. 

For what it’s worth, Marty Supreme is O’Leary’s film debut, and the vast majority of his time on camera before this was for a reality TV show where they would “bang out multiple episodes in one day.” This is fundamentally different from how a film like Marty Supreme, which employed dozens of craftspeople who dedicated themselves to portraying historical details, works. “What specifically changed my view was the fact that so much of the improvised lines made it into the final cut,” O’Leary says now. “That only happens in the magic of 4 a.m., when somebody says something that the other actor riffs off of.” He also learned that he wouldn’t want to act opposite a Tilly Norwood (or a Norwell Tilly, for that matter) because “I don’t know how you can do it any other way than just have those actors in that moment… Or if an extra is in an interaction with the principal, you can never use AI because you’ll never have the cadence. It won’t work next year. It won’t work the year after that.” And for that reason, he’s out.