Kat Dennings doesn’t think she’s in Avengers: Doomsday but revealed Marvel scanned her likeness, so who knows? Body scanning has become the latest scary story in Hollywood. Actors like Nicolas Cage have spoken out on how terrifying it is to have your likeness scanned into a computer, making it entirely possible for studios to put ... Kat Dennings was scanned by Marvel: “They could put me in anything they want”
Kat Dennings doesn’t think she’s in Avengers: Doomsday but revealed Marvel scanned her likeness, so who knows?
Body scanning has become the latest scary story in Hollywood. Actors like Nicolas Cage have spoken out on how terrifying it is to have your likeness scanned into a computer, making it entirely possible for studios to put you in a film you didn’t know you were going to be in with the help of AI. We’d really hope it’s not quite this easy, but we also haven’t read the small print. We hope the actors have.
Kat Dennings is the latest actor to reveal she’s been scanned. “I’m in the system!” the actor said, having been digitised during her work on the Thor films. Entertainment Weekly asked her if she’s going to be in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday and Dennings denied this, having not filmed any new material for the studio.
“They did scan me, so to be honest, they could put me in anything they want at this point,” Dennings said. “Who knows!”
Dennings was busy filming her new series Shifting Gears, so it’s unlikely we will see Dennings’ character Darcy when Robert Downey Jr’s Dr Doom starts wreaking havoc in December, but if she can’t quite rule it out entirely, maybe we shouldn’t either.
Read more: Tilly Norwood | We can still fight back against the rise of creepy AI actors
Cage spoke out on the increasingly common practice of scanning actors in a 2024 interview with The New Yorker. In fact, the actor had to leave to get himself scanned – twice! – after the interview for Spider-Man Noir, and he didn’t seem too happy about it.
“They have to put me in a computer and match my eye color and change — I don’t know,” the actor said.
“They’re just going to steal my body and do whatever they want with it via digital AI. … God, I hope not AI. I’m terrified of that. I’ve been very vocal about it. … And it makes me wonder, you know, where will the truth of the artists end up?”
He added: “Is it going to be replaced? Is it going to be transmogrified? Where’s the heartbeat going to be? I mean, what are you going to do with my body and my face when I’m dead? I don’t want you to do anything with it!”
Marvel has previously explained that they scan actors in their costumes, so the VFX department can re-create them during post-production.
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“In most Marvel films, we scan all the actors in their costume with other costumes so that we have a really good 3D scan of everything,” VFX supervisor Stephane Ceretti explained in 2018. “So it’s all built based off their real sizes, and we have to recreate the costume to make sure that they wrinkle correctly.”
It does seem like a slippery slope, but we’re hoping studios can hold on to some sense of ethics when it comes to using generative AI. We’re not holding our breath, though. Thankfully, the UK actors’ union has already promised to oppose scanning until there are appropriate protections against AI.
