Academy Award-winning actor Robert Downey Jr. is making his long-awaited Broadway debut starring in Lincoln Center Theater’s world premiere of Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal, currently in previews and opening at the Vivian Beaumont Theater September 30. And making its own Broadway debut alongside the film star? A “highly realistic Metahuman Digital Likeness” of Downey himself.
No, it’s not robot Robert Downey, Jr., or even hologram Robert Downey Jr. The creation is a fully digital version of the actor that can talk using Downey’s voice, all thanks to one of today’s most incendiary new tech tools: artificial intelligence. The creation is the work of AGBO (a production company founded by directors, producers, and writers Anthony and Joseph Russo) and Fortnite developer Donald Mustard. “They were thinking about how we could create digital assets of performing artists with recognizable faces and voices and at least stem the tide of all this plagiarism that’s been going on,” Downey explains to Playbill. Basically, if there’s an official digital version of Robert Downey Jr., its creators hope that will help them differentiate from any non-consensual fakes that crop up. “It’s almost like cybersecurity for your body and voice.”
The digital Downey is helping tell Akhtar’s story of an accomplished author facing his impending mortality. Jacob McNeal, Downey’s character, is obsessive. Whether that’s the prospect of winning the Nobel Prize in Literature (one of the few honors that has eluded his illustrious career) or what is to become of his legacy when he’s gone, McNeal fixates. And the reason we have the digital Downey in McNeal is that one of his fixations is A.I. The creation figures into a secondary story, one that plays out between the scenes with the human actors and which tracks the progression of technology, A.I.’s growing power, and the implications that creates.
“I’m not sure the play is embracing A.I.,” says Akhtar, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright behind Disgraced and Junk. “I think it’s putting us in a situation of grappling with the realities of it, as opposed to just our fears or just our hopes.” Akhtar is referring to how the technology has become the hottest of hot topics since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022.
The concept of artificial intelligence isn’t exactly new—we’ve had digital assistants like Siri and Alexa helping us check the weather and figure out how old celebrities are for years now, along with countless other harmless implementations of software that helps computers talk and think in semi-humanoid ways.
But then there’s ChatGPT. Its developers, OpenAI, found a way to build a tool that could synthesize huge chunks of the internet, taking in both raw knowledge and human speech patterns. The result was a program that could talk to you in a way that felt almost like talking to a person. Armed with internet knowledge, it could answer even complex questions (mostly) accurately. And, perhaps most notably, it could create seemingly new content—users could input bullet point topics and get a fully written-out email in return, or input pages of jumbled notes and get back a concise outline. ChatGPT can even create screenplays, novels, and song lyrics. Suddenly, what used to feel mostly benign is now invoking dystopian visions of computers coming for our jobs or worse, taking over.
You don’t tend to see much nuance in the A.I. conversations happening currently in the media. Reactions have continued to be extreme since ChatGPT entered the scene. Talk to a tech executive, and A.I. is the second-coming that will make all our lives better, and businesses more profitable. Talk to an artist, and it’s an existential threat coming for our jobs, for humanity. “A lot of the conversations we’re having are binary,” says Bartlett Sher, LCT’s new executive producer and McNeal’s director. “It’s it versus us—and that breaks the conversation down. What’s beautiful about great writing and theatre is that it gets you in the middle. It gets you in the complexities.”
It’s still surprising that anyone in the entertainment industry is as willing as the company of McNeal to add nuance to the A.I. debate. The very existence of the technology, the possibility of it being used to replace artists was a central issue in the recent Hollywood actor and writer strikes. And to boil those conversations down to just a few words, actor and writer unions have been pretty unequivocal: no A.I. ever.
But Akhtar, a writer both for the stage and screen, doesn’t seem to agree fully with his unions. Part of the way he’s starting conversations with McNeal is pointing out some uncomfortable realities that often get left out of A.I. discussions. In fact, he’s not even sure A.I. is all that different from what artists have been doing for centuries. “I know, as an artist, that Harold Bloom is right: poets don’t create poems from life, they create poems from other poems,” he says. In McNeal, the title character asks ChatGPT to reconfigure works from greats like Shakespeare, Ibsen, Kafka, and others to be in the style of McNeal. Is that output, however artificial, itself part of McNeal’s legacy once he’s gone?
And, it turns out, that concept mirrors history from way before even computers (much less A.I.) were around. “When Shakespeare was a young man,” Akhtar shares, “he performed in a play titled King Leir, and his King Lear—one of the finest plays ever written—is made up of 70 percent of the words from that earlier play.” McNeal is, in large part, Akhtar’s way of asking how—or if—that differs from what A.I. technology makes possible.
As for Digital Downey, the real-life Downey says it’s nothing to be afraid of. And, he says, McNeal won't be the last time you might see it (him?).
“He’s probably available for weddings and Bar Mitzvahs right now,” Downey says laughing. “Prime-time cameos are next to come.”
Ayad Akhtar and Bartlett Sher
Company of McNeal
Ayad Akhtar, Robert Downey Jr., and Bartlett Sher
Robert Downey Jr.
Brittany Bellizeare and Rafi Gavron
Saisha Talwar and Ruthie Ann Miles
Melora Hardin
Andrea Martin
