Ellen Page: The Last Of Us "ripped off my likeness"
Inception actress displeased by her lookalike Ellie
Actress Ellen Page has used a Reddit AMA session to express her displeasure at similarities between herself and The Last Of Us heroine Ellie.
"I guess I should be flattered that they ripped off my likeness, but I am actually acting in a video game called Beyond Two Souls, so it was not appreciated," she said in post about the Naughty Dog title.
If anything Naughty Dog toned down Ellie's likeness to Page between reveal and launch, but put the change down to wanting to better reflect the actress playing Ellie, Ashley Johnson.
"After delving further into the game's narrative over the past few months, we decided to modify Ellie's model to better reflect Ashley's personality, and also resemble a slightly younger teen more fitting to the story," said creative director Neil Druckmann last May.
"We're happy with the final result shown in the cinematic we have released today, and hope the fans like her too."
Page is currently the star of Quantic Dream's latest title, Beyond: Two Souls, and spoke about the game during her AMA.
"We did do our own motion capture. The suits are not that bad actually...it is sort of nice to not sorry about wardrobe. Willem is an incredible actor and I loved working with him," she said of the project.
"I played video games more when I was a kid. I had Sega Genesis and was a HUGE Sonic fan. I also love the NHL games and played them with my brother all time. Then I was super into Playstation and loved the FIFA games. I recently played my first video game in a while. I played the latest Tomb Raider and really enjoyed it, finished in about 12 hours."
There is the EA NCAA football case. However, that was the likeness of people being presented as those specific people, which was judged to have gone beyond fair use.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Sam Brown on 24th June 2013 12:48pm
But anyway, Im gonna make a comment which is off topic. Ellen Paige sure looks pretty in the article photo. <3
Are you sure those "December" and "now" mugshots aren't mixed up? If anything she looks more similar around the mouth area in the "now", though her eyes and nose have been enlarged slightly. Either way - her jawline doesn't look anything like Ellen's and, well, hair is hair.
[edit] Not Insomniac! LOL. I meant Naughty Dog.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by James Prendergast on 24th June 2013 3:29pm
In the case of the NCAA case, an NCAA player is not allowed to accept compensation in any form for their direct or indirect involvement in the NCAA. I don't remember the specifics of the case, but I do remember thinking that was stretching the bounds of taking 'advantage of the contract law' a bit too far.
I agree with the notion that there are many people in the world that look alike and this character is not a photographic image of Ellen Page, in fact I had no idea there was a likeness.
I don't know about Kurt Russell, but that's more than enough compensation for me. Even if I never saw a dime of the money, having an entire video game franchise based off a character I played in a movie is more flattering than any dollar sign. Especially when the character is as much of a pure BAMF as Snake Plissken.
Of course, the negotiations concluded with him getting paid for a quick shot of his digitized face on a monitor and his dead corpse model changed to one with a smashed in face that was unrecognizable.
So, I'd gather Page wants some sort of compensation or at least, an acknowledgment that yup, it's her face in those early builds.
Off topic - This made me laugh because I can recall a bunch of game cover art from the 90's that used adult film stars as reference and I'm sure they didn't get a dime.
C'mon, that's taking the mickey. She's understandably annoyed.
The important thing is that I finish Skyrim soon, so I can play The Last of Us.
There is a limited set of genes in the human pool... lots of us look quite a like - especially from certain angles. In fact, just to point out one (though I have no picture here) I look like a less Spanish/hispanic version of Rick Lopez. For her to call it out, when she has no proof is just conceited in my opinion. If Naughty Dog had come out and said we modelled Ellie on Ellen Page, then yeah - she has a case to be annoyed... but, honestly, Ellie looks like a generic "apple-faced teenage girl".
Edited 1 times. Last edit by James Prendergast on 24th June 2013 6:31pm
Snake Plissken: Yeah, you and everybody else!
Let me spell it out to you. An actor or actress make their living on their looks. A court of law will not take to kindly to those looks being used without permission or compensation in a commercial venture.
So please feel free to go into denial mode but, the reality is and will be that somewhere along the line money will need to change hands.
What amuses me is the number of PS3 fanboys over at Yahoo claiming the model looks totally different from her.
I couldn't shake the feeling it was Ellen Page the entire time I was playing. Having gotten the game not really (purposely) reading much about it, I mistakenly believed it was modeled off of Ellen, and not being super familiar with Ellen Paige - I assumed she was the voice actress as well until I finished the game and did more research. And as the saying goes, if I'm thinking this - then it's pretty safe to assume there are a lot of other gamers out there making the same mistake. I can understand her beef with Naughty Dog, and I think they should have taken some further steps to obfuscate the reference they were using- especially considering Beyond Two Souls coming out.
Peter Dwyer - First off, actors do not only make their living off their looks - otherwise many of the "great" actors would be terrible at enunciation, delivery and, well, acting.
Secondly, where is it said that Page was used as reference? Some people are actually very close to libel with these sorts of baseless remarks. If Page has proof then she should ask them either for a) compensation or b) to remove the current Ellie model from the game. Just to head it off - proof isn't looking at the face of the model and saying they look similar. You do a search for "teenage girl" and see how many random people you pick out that are similar. Since they didn't even have a VA who sounded similar to Page she has even less of a platform to stand on.
Remember when the guy from Back to the Future sued the film's creators because they used someone who looked similar to him when he refused to play the part in the next two films due to him wanting a huge raise? He won... but how is that right? The other guy who looked like him had the rights to his own looks too...
[edit]
I saw a great comment over on Ars that I thought was relevant here:
It's doubtful that any parties actually involved actually care. This is simply a way to bring attention to Ellen Page, Ashley Johnson, Naughty Dog and Quantic Dream simultaneously. As they say, there's no such thing as bad publicity.
I think people are getting way to hett-up by these comments and are running to defend... something, I don't know what exactly but something.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by James Prendergast on 25th June 2013 6:52am
Creating a whole article with this title based on a simple comment leads to confusions like this. Ellen is probably not that workup up about it. It was the 7th most upvoted comment (because Reddit currently circlejerk about TLOU), so she had no choice but to reply something.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Pier Castonguay on 25th June 2013 6:59am
Edited 2 times. Last edit by Makeda De'Jene on 25th June 2013 4:27pm
http://tinyurl.com/qdy8dqp
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/06/ellen-page-thinks-naughty-dog-ripped-off-her-likeness-for-the-last-of-us/
As game's fidelity gets greater and greater and AAA keeps chasing after "realism", this is going to come up, more and more. It's one thing you look at a bunch of photos and then cobble together some sort of likeness in 2500, 5000 or so polygons. It's another thing to emulate someone's aesthetic convincingly and have them "acting" in a piece of media they did not do. Especially, when you are an actress and a large part of your appeal is your aesthetic.
http://postimg.org/image/hteqkk4g5/
Edited 2 times. Last edit by Aleksi Ranta on 7th July 2013 8:37pm
In all honesty, whenever I saw trailers and gameplay of Last of Us, I never once thought "Oh look Ellen Paige is in two games now!"...I just thought "Damn...why isn't this game on PC?"