When Star Wars: Rogue One was released in 2016, it was a prequel to movies that were by then nearly 40 years old. The events in the film immediately precede those of A New Hope, which released in 1977. However, for Rogue One, the creators faced a conundrum. The original actors were 40 years older, and some were vital to the world of the story. But that wasn’t their biggest problem.
While many actors were still available, one actor, Peter Cushing, who played Grand Moff Tarkin, had passed away in 1994. Rather than giving up on having him in the movie, the lucrative movie franchise decided to resurrect him. They digitally inserted his appearance using conventional CGI.
At the time, some people wondered about the ethical issues of using the likeness of someone who was no longer around to approve or object (although it was done with the approval of his estate). In an interview in the New York Times, John Knoll, the visual effects supervisor for Rogue One, denied that it was the start of a slippery slope toward using more dead actors in movies:
