A trailer for As Deep as the Grave introduced an AI-created screen version of Val Kilmer at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on April 15, putting a late actor’s digital likeness at the center of a historical drama still seeking distribution. The footage offers the first substantial public look at Kilmer as Father Fintan, a character he was cast to play but never filmed before his death in 2025.
Writer-director Coerte Voorhees and producer John Voorhees say they made the representation with the participation of Kilmer’s estate and his daughter, Mercedes Kilmer, drawing on archival visual and audio material. The project is unusual less because it uses digital tools than because it is built around a posthumous, generative-AI recreation of a recognizable Hollywood actor—and because its makers are presenting estate approval, compensation and collaboration as essential parts of the case for doing so.
A role rebuilt from archival material
Variety’s report from CinemaCon described the trailer’s Father Fintan as appearing at different apparent ages. The character is a Catholic priest; accounts have also variously described him as a Native American or Indigenous spiritualist. Those differing descriptions leave little basis for broader claims about the character beyond the role as presented in the film’s publicity.
As Deep as the Grave follows archaeologists Ann and Earl Morris in the American Southwest during the 1920s. Abigail Lawrie, Tom Felton and Abigail Breslin are among the cast. Production began in New Mexico in 2020 and later encountered pandemic delays, according to ABC News’ interviews with the Voorhees brothers.
The filmmakers’ account is that Kilmer was interested in the part but was too ill to perform it physically. Mercedes Kilmer has likewise said her father wanted to take part in this particular project. Yet the public reporting does not disclose a contract, a specific record of Kilmer’s prior consent to this exact technical process, or the terms governing use of his likeness and recordings. What is documented in the coverage is the estate’s participation after his death, not a publicly available legal paper trail.
That also affects how the footage should be described. Kilmer did not shoot new scenes for the film, and the generated character is not a conventional filmed performance by him. Coerte Voorhees has framed it as a performance Kilmer influenced; Mercedes Kilmer told Vanity Fair that she regarded the result as a form of animation rather than acting. The distinction is more than semantic: archival recordings and images can inform a digital character without turning the final synthetic material into newly performed work.
Consent claims, with important limits
The Voorhees brothers have said the production worked with the estate, paid it and followed SAG-AFTRA guidelines. They have also said the estate supplied archival material. Those are meaningful assertions in an industry increasingly focused on digital replicas, but the cited reports do not publish the compensation amount, contract scope, underlying permissions or union documentation. The available accounts therefore support saying that the filmmakers claim compliance and compensation, not that the terms have been independently established in public.
Mercedes Kilmer has set a narrow boundary around the permission. In her Vanity Fair interview, she said the estate did not intend to authorize AI versions of her father for other projects. That limit separates this film’s estate-backed arrangement from the growing market for unapproved voice clones, image models and social-media deepfakes, while also underscoring that permission for one work is not a blanket license for a performer’s future digital use.
The filmmakers have argued that replacing Kilmer with another actor would have meant losing a role conceived around him. It is their explanation for retaining Father Fintan, rather than evidence that generative AI is necessary in comparable productions. The film’s publicity arrives during an ongoing labor debate in which performers have sought clearer rights to consent, compensation and notice when their likenesses, voices or digital doubles are reused.
The trailer is one point in a longer rollout
The CinemaCon appearance should not be confused with a newly launched film. The trailer debuted April 15, with coverage published that day and the following day. In June, Vanity Fair reported that the film remained unfinished and had no distributor. A later IndieWire report, published Aug. 19, said the production released nearly seven minutes of footage.
In that later account, the filmmakers estimated that the Kilmer character appears for about one hour and 17 minutes in a film running more than three hours. If that estimate holds, Father Fintan would occupy a substantial portion of the completed picture rather than functioning as a brief cameo. It also makes the project a more consequential test of audience response than a single digitally restored scene would be.
For now, the practical status remains unresolved. Despite the CinemaCon trailer and the later footage release, the June reporting said As Deep as the Grave had no announced distributor or release date, and no later announcement in the available coverage changes that position.
