Free Guy, the much-delayed movie featuring Ryan Reynolds as a self-aware NPC in a videogame, is now out and arguably its most horrifying character is has become a skin in Fortnite.
That character is called “The Dude” and is played by two people in the movie: Reynolds as the face, and a body double providing the cartoonishly huge muscles.
Below you can see how The Dude looks when inside of Fortnite and it’s doesn’t look too bad. If you told us it was a spoof of John Cena from The Sims we would have believed you, but it does the trick.
Who says nice guys always finish last? The Dude from @FreeGuyMovie, apparently.
He’s flexed his way into the Shop, so grab him while you can! pic.twitter.com/GFj2NPk9le
— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) August 13, 2021
What you see in the header image, however, is how The Dude actually looks in the movie.
On Reynolds’ YouTube channel the actor released a video called “Next Level Reynolds” as a promotional spot for Free Guy.
This shows snippets of The Dude from the movie (which is where the header image comes from) as well as some fake behind the scenes.
The compositing of Reynolds’ face on the body double is terrifying. We’re not sure how a big budget movie like this can create such a monstrosity when deepfakes and facial replacements are becoming more common and easy to do even from home with open source software.
Of course it isn’t just Free Guy creating uncanny characters like this. Disney recently hired a deepfake expert to fix a bad face replacement in The Mandalorian. The news story about that can be read here, but it contains spoilers for The Mandalorian season two.
Free Guy is out only in theatres right now overseas. In South Africa a preliminary theatrical release schedule sent to us shows a provisional date of 20th August. The Dude skin is available in the Fortnite in-game shop for 1 200 V-Bucks.
