Greta Garbo's heirs open door to AI resurrection for film roles

More than a century after Greta Garbo's screen debut, and decades after her ashes were scattered in a Swedish woodland cemetery, her descendants have greenlit an artificial intelligence version of the Hollywood legend to perform in moving pictures again. The occasion was a 99-second advertisement for SKF, a Swedish ball-bearing manufacturer—a company Garbo herself had appeared for in a promotional film back in 1921, when she was still finding her footing in cinema.

The AI Garbo was not built by feeding photographs or video into a machine learning model. Copyright protections made that impossible. Instead, the creators—working with AI systems from China's Seedream and Google's Nano Banana Pro—constructed her likeness from text descriptions alone: the ice-blue eyes, the wavy blond bob, the particular tilt of her face. A human actor performed the role while the AI-generated appearance was layered over top. Her voice came from a recording pulled from one of her early films and reconstructed through synthesis. The result was striking enough to move Craig Reisfield, one of three relatives managing Garbo's estate, to describe himself as "flabbergasted" when he first saw it. Reisfield, a Swedish-American who once drove for his great-aunt and knew her during her years in New York, said the technical achievement was "startling" and "very impactful." He was particularly impressed by how the AI had captured her mannerisms, the way she held herself, the texture of her clothing, even the subtle movements of her face.

The advertisement itself is an odd artifact. Garbo, who played a famous ballerina in Grand Hotel and a doomed courtesan in Camille during Hollywood's golden age, here delivers lines about friction and energy loss while ball-bearings spin across the screen. At one point, her reconstructed voice sounds oddly contemporary—like a British politician complaining about cheese imports—as she intones that "around 20% of all global energy is lost to friction: a terrible waste." Yet the advertisement ends with her most famous line, spoken in Grand Hotel: "I want to be alone."

What began as a one-off commercial has opened a door that Garbo's heirs seem willing to walk through. When asked whether an AI version of Garbo could be cast in actual film roles, Reisfield did not demur. "I won't say no, especially having seen what I've seen," he said. "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?" He argued that Garbo herself—who had dominated the silent era, made the transition to talking pictures, and captivated audiences across gender lines—would likely have embraced the technology. The custodians of her rights, he said, aim to "preserve, protect, and enhance" her legacy and are "very discerning" about partnerships. Her image has already been licensed posthumously to fashion houses including Ferragamo, Gucci, and Louis Vuitton, but the SKF advertisement marks her first appearance in moving images since her death.

The practice has drawn criticism. Some observers call it "ghostploitation"—the digital resurrection of the dead for commercial purposes. The actor Val Kilmer, who died last year, has also been reanimated this way. Yet the technology is accelerating across the industry. Major film studios are now investing in AI startups or partnering with new AI production companies. Established directors like Ron Howard and Paul Schrader are experimenting with AI-enabled filmmaking, while a new generation of creators—artists with names like Kavan the Kid and Gossip Goblin—are using AI to build audiences entirely outside the traditional studio system. The question of whether Garbo's heirs will actually commission a full film role remains open. But the fact that they are willing to consider it signals something larger: the dead are no longer simply preserved in archives. They are becoming available for new performances, in a medium their creators never imagined.