Of course Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary wants movies to save money with AI actors

O'Leary suggests Marty Supreme could have benefited from "100 Norwell Tillies."

Of course Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary wants movies to save money with AI actors

Kevin O’Leary has acted in exactly one movie, but that isn’t stopping him from voicing his opinions on what the industry is doing wrong. Naturally, the bullish Shark Tank investor has some tips for how Josh Safdie and A24 could have saved money on all those pesky human extras they had to pay to walk around behind him in Marty Supreme. “Almost every scene had as many as 150 extras. Now, those people have to stay awake for 18 hours, be completely dressed in the background. [They’re] not necessarily in the movie, but they’re necessary to be there moving around. And yet, it costs millions of dollars to do that,” O’Leary said on a recent episode of The Hill’s World of Travel: The Podcast, per Variety

His solution? You probably already guessed it. “Why couldn’t you simply put AI agents in their place?” he continued. “Because they’re not the main actors. They’re only in the story visually. [You could] save millions of dollars, so more movies could be made. The same director, instead of spending $90 million or whatever he spent, could’ve spent $35 million and made two movies.” 

It sounds like O’Leary’s experience performing alongside the likes of Timothée Chalamet and Gwyneth Paltrow didn’t spark much regarding the sanctity of human artistic expression. In fact, O’Leary would have been just as happy with AI “actress” Tilly Norwood as a co-star. “She’s 100% AI. She doesn’t exist. But she’s a great actress,” he opined. “She can come in any age you want. She doesn’t need to eat, so she works 24 hours a day. The union is going out of their mind.” If the two were to appear in a movie together, O’Leary wouldn’t even need to learn Norwood’s real name, which—for all his endorsement of her—he doesn’t currently know. “I’d argue, for the sake of the art, you should allow [AI] in certain cases,” he went on. “An extra is a really good case, because you can’t tell the difference. You just put 100 Norwell Tillies in there and you’re good.” We’ll see if some intrepid director takes O’Leary up on that horrifying proposal in the years to come. In the meantime, you can watch him and his human co-stars in Marty Supreme on Christmas Day. 

 
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