Mark Wahlberg has added his name to the list of actors who will say yes, under conditions, to a synthetic version of themselves. In a conversation covered by TechCrunch, he framed AI in filmmaking around doing it 'the right way' and said he is open to an AI clone carrying on his legacy.
The phrase 'the right way' is doing a lot of work in Hollywood right now, because the industry has spent three years negotiating what it means. The 2023 strikes produced the first contract language on digital replicas: consent, a defined scope of use, compensation, and the requirement that a performer — or their estate — authorise the creation and each use. Those provisions were renewed and tightened in later contracts, and they are what separates a licensed digital double from an unlicensed one.
The technical reality behind them is that the labour of a performance is becoming separable from the performer. A model trained on an actor's likeness and voice can be directed, re-shot and re-voiced without the actor on set; de-aging already does a narrow version of this on the largest productions, where the cost is justified. Falling inference costs and video-generation models push that capability toward ordinary budgets.
That produces the debate Wahlberg is stepping into. To one side, a licensed replica is estate planning: an actor controls their likeness, gets paid, and their work outlives them. To the other, it is the beginning of a market where performers compete against perpetual, never-ageing, never-union versions of themselves.
Consent under contract is the compromise the industry reached. Whether it holds as a norm or erodes into a condition of employment is the question the next round of bargaining will settle.
