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Every now and then my mother will stop and say, apropos of nothing, “You know, I really thought we would’ve had teleportation by now.” Well Ma, we may not have teleportation, but we do have holograms and they’re causing existential crises for celebrities and their legacies. We heard Dolly Parton chime in last week and she gave it a sweet and folksy no thank you. Now Whoopi Goldberg has weighed in, saying on a recent episode of The View that she’s taken precautions in her will to guard against any hologram of her being made after she’s gone:
Whoopi Goldberg really wants you to know that she does not want to live on in this life as a hologram.
During a discussion about Aretha Franklin’s newly discovered couch-dwelling will papers, the Oscar-winning Ghost actress, Diablo IV video game fanatic, and The View moderator revealed that her own will prevents anyone from making a digital hologram of her likeness after she dies.
“Yeah, no, I don’t want to be a hologram, but that’s been in my will for 15 years,” the 67-year-old cohost said on Wednesday’s episode of the talk show, referring to a celebrity hologram modeled after Whitney Houston.
Cohost Joy Behar then quipped, “No one has really asked me if I want to be a hologram yet,” to which Goldberg replied: “They don’t ask you, that’s the thing. They just do it, and then you go, ‘Hey, isn’t that Tupac? Wait a minute, didn’t Tupac die? What is he doing up on…’ Yeah, see, I don’t want that. It’s a little freaky, creepy.
Alyssa Farah Griffin chimed in to say she thought it was okay if the celebrity’s estate approved of such a move, but Goldberg shut that down, too.
“Yeah, my estate doesn’t want it,” Goldberg said. “My estate wants to be left alone.”
This isn’t the first time Goldberg has revealed the contents of her will on The View. In December 2022, she said that her post-death documents prevent unauthorized biopics about her life.
“They’re not going to make films because in my will it says, ‘Unless you speak to my family, try it.’ Try it,” Goldberg said at the time.
So I’m lucky in that my day job is working with the estate of a dearly-departed entertainer, and I can tell you that this is a hot-button issue right now (holograms, not Whoopi’s will). And for obvious reasons, right? Operating under the assumption that we can’t control anything after we die, the drive then is to preemptively protect yourself from people putting words in your mouth and from being associated with something you don’t sign off on, and naturally all that is amplified in the case of a public figure. Putting explicit instructions in legal writing is necessary–don’t forget how close we came to Justin Timberlake besmirching Prince with a hologram at the 2018 Superbowl Halftime Show. With SAG-AFTRA officially on strike alongside the WGA, and one of the key issues being safeguards against AI, I think we’re going to be hearing a lot of artists talking more openly about this. So I think Whoopi is doing the right thing in spelling out her wishes clearly in her will. That being said, it is pretty hilarious that she’s thinking about keeping other people from maligning her image when she does a heck of a job doing that to herself.
I find the hologram thing creepy and disrespectful.
Me too Eleanor. The whole thing is creepy and unnatural! let the departed RIP!
Agreed. The hologram is disrespectful.