Tom Cruise deepfaked as American Psycho's Patrick Bateman

When Christian Bale was cast as Patrick Bateman, the obsessive yet vacuous investment banker and serial killer prowling 1980s Manhattan, he searched for inspiration. He found a Tom Cruise interview, as related by director Mary Harron: "We talked about how Martian-like Patrick Bateman was, how he was looking at the world like somebody from another planet, watching what people did and trying to work out the right way to behave. And then one day he called me and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy."

Now you can watch Tom Cruise play the role, deepfaked over Bale and dubbed by Evan Ferrante. It's so convincing, not just in the technical aspects of the deepfake but the plain fact of Cruise's obvious appropropriateness to the role. There's a petulant, simmering anger that comes naturally to Cruise on screen, an intensity that Bale did not quite fully emulate in his otherwise excellent performance.

It's NSFW throughout, but the second half is the actual "sex" scene; stop the video 45s in to avoid it. Read the rest