Tom Cruise deepfake creator finally comes forward

There’s been a Deepfake Tom Cruise TikTok account that’s been going viral and the creator has finally come forward as Belgium VFX specialist Chris Ume.

“You can’t do it by just pressing a button,” says Ume. “That’s important, that’s a message I want to tell people.” Each clip took weeks of work, he says, using the open-source DeepFaceLab algorithm as well as established video editing tools. “By combining traditional CGI and VFX with deepfakes, it makes it better. I make sure you don’t see any of the glitches.”

To get the effect he also hired Tom Cruise impersonator Miles Fisher, so this kind of thing probably wouldn’t work if you just used a random person off the street. I mean, unless you were trying to convince the world Tom Cruise had completely let himself go and was now just a guy eating leftover nachos out of the microwave.

Keep going for the full video breakdown of his process as well as an episode of Sassy Justice, another deepfake video series that Chris works on.

And Sassy Justice: