The actor could act again in the movie as his voice was recreated through advanced AI technology.
Top Gun: Maverick, a sequel to the original 1986's Top Gun, opened in theaters on May 27. Like the previous part, the movie stars Tom Cruise as Captain Pete "Maverick" Mitchell and brings the original cast including Val Kilmer.
However, bringing back Val Kilmer as Tom "Iceman" Kazansky came along with some complications as the actor, unfortunately, has lost the ability to speak clearly due to a tracheotomy he underwent in 2014 as part of his treatment for throat cancer.
The actor anyway was able to appear in the film as his voice was brought back thanks to advanced AI technology. In an interview with Page Six, Val Kilmer's daughter, Mercedes Kilmer, shared that the actor's voice was recreated in the movie by the production team and London-based AI firm Sonantic.
"They were able to dub him with his own voice, which is amazing," Mercedes said. "It’s such a technical feat, being able to engineer his voice that way, that it’s an extension of the technical feat of the film."
This is not the first time when the firm is working together with Val Kilmer. Last year, Sonantic shared the work process of how it cooperated with the actor to train an algorithm using old recordings of his voice to synthesize new speech.
Sonantic explained that it was a challenging process as Kilmer's team could provide only a relatively small amount of recorded material. To recreate the actor's voice, the firm first cleaned the old recordings' audio to remove the background noise in a way to avoid the destruction of speech content, then it generated transcripts from the audio and paired the audio and text in short pieces. After that, the Voice Engine started to train the model.
After some additional work and implementing new algorithms, Sonantic was able to produce over 40 higher-quality models and select the best one.
In a promotional video, Kilmer said using the digitally-constructed voice: "I was struck by throat cancer. After getting treated, my voice as I knew it was taken away from me. People around me struggle to understand me when I'm talking. But despite all that, I still feel I'm the exact same person. Still the same creative soul."
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