Relatives of Hollywood legend say her doppelganger could now be used for more glamorous roles
She shimmered in Hollywood’s silent movie era and lit up the first talkies – now Greta Garbo may be about to star in cinema’s new AI age.
More than a century after her screen debut and decades after her ashes were laid to rest in a Swedish woodland cemetery, the Hollywood superstar’s descendants are ready to consider an AI version of her taking a 21st-century film role.
Her likeness has already been reanimated for an advert for a Swedish industrial company, using AI generation technology. The practice some critics call “ghostploitation” has also been used in the case of the actor Val Kilmer, who died last year.
Asked if the AI Garbo could be cast in other roles, Craig Reisfield, one of three relatives who manage her legacy, told the Guardian: “I won’t say no, especially having seen what I’ve seen. It’s pretty incredible and lifelike. So what’s to say that you can’t bring Greta Garbo back in some kind of fashion in a film role?”
Reisfield said he was “flabbergasted” when he saw the AI version of his great-aunt created for publicity for the ball-bearings giant SKF. The connection comes because Garbo’s second-ever screen role was in a 1921 promotional film involving the Gothenburg-based company.
While Garbo was the definition of glamour in Hollywood’s golden age, appearing as a famous ballerina in Grand Hotel (1932) and as a doomed courtesan in Camille (1936), the 99-second AI performance for SKF is intercut with shots of ball-bearings.
However, the quality of the AI production has prompted the possibility, at least, of a greater digital comeback.
“I was totally impressed: the mannerisms that they could capture and manipulate, her dress, facial images and even her voice,” said Reisfield, a Swedish-American who used to drive for Garbo and saw her often for family occasions when she lived in New York.
“It was startling what they could do and very impactful. And it was touching, from my perspective having known her.”
A far cry from the hand-cranked cameras that captured Garbo’s early work, the SKF performance was conjured by humans prompting AI models including China’s Seedream and Google’s Nano Banana Pro.
Unusually for AI film-making, the creators did not feed moving or still images of Garbo into the AI because the material was protected by copyright. Instead, they used text prompts to create her likeness, including her ice-blue eyes and wavy blond bob. A human actor then played her role with her AI-generated appearance overlaid. Her voice was recreated from a recording from an early film.
The resulting version of Garbo appears to have gone beyond the “uncanny valley” – the problem for AI film-makers in which the closer to an actual likeness an AI rendering becomes, the more strangely implausible it seems.
AI Garbo’s lines, however, are not perhaps quite up to the standards of those given to her by MGM studio writers. At one point, she sounds like Liz Truss complaining about the “disgrace” of Britain’s cheese imports, when she says “around 20% of all global energy is lost to friction: a terrible waste”.
Several big film studios are investing in AI startups or collaborating with new AI studios. Veteran directors including Ron Howard and Paul Schrader are working on AI-enabled films, while a new generation of AI-native film-makers such as Kavan the Kid and Gossip Goblin are using AI to build huge audiences outside the conventional studio system.
Asked whether the real Garbo would have wanted to continue performing as an AI-enabled actor, Reisfield said: “She was at the forefront of cinema in the silent film era. She made the transition to ‘talkies’ and dominated box office receipts.
“So to imagine her as an AI-enabled actor given her track record and ability to captivate and connect with audiences of both men and women isn’t inconceivable.”
Reisfield said the custodians of the rights to Garbo’s voice, name, image and publicity aimed to “preserve, protect, and enhance” her legacy and were “very discerning” on partnerships. Her likeness has been posthumously used by the fashion houses Ferragamo, Gucci and Louis Vuitton but the AI performance for SKF is her first in moving images.
Whatever the future holds for AI Garbo, it kept to the true spirit of the actor by signing off the ball-bearing advert with her immortal line from Grand Hotel: “I want to be alone.”