The actor says he spent “maybe three hours” on the set of “The Flash,” and was told his character, an alternate version of Kal-El, would be “standing in an alternate dimension, if you will, and witnessing the destruction of the universe.” Cage says he had no lines and had to act only with his eyes, noting, “you can imagine with that short amount of time that I had, what that would mean in terms of what I can convey.” Obviously, that work is not what ended up in “The Flash” at all. Instead, as Cage puts it, “When I went to the picture, it was me fighting a giant spider. I did not do that. That was not what I did.”
While the actor says he thinks the sequence was probably achieved through a combination of digital de-aging and CGI, it clearly calls to mind conversations about the state of the industry in regards to artificial intelligence and performances being co-opted without actors’ consent. “I don’t think it [was] AI [in The Flash]. I just think that they did something with it, and again, it’s out of my control,” Cage explained, while noting that he agrees with director Tim Burton’s anti-AI sentiments. Burton recently spoke to Variety about the way AI has been used to bastardize his own works, saying, “It takes something from your soul or psyche; that is very disturbing, especially if it has to do with you. It’s like a robot taking your humanity, your soul.”
