Val Kilmer, who died in 2025 after a years-long battle with throat cancer, will appear in an upcoming indie film — and his family approved every frame of it.

As Deep As the Grave, written and directed by Coerte Voorhees, tells the true story of Southwestern archaeologists Ann and Earl Morris, chronicling their excavations in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. Kilmer was cast as Father Fintan — a Catholic priest and Native American spiritualist — five years before his death. Due to his worsening illness, he never filmed a single scene.

Voorhees worked with Kilmer's daughter Mercedes and son Jack, who were both supportive, to create an AI-generated version of the actor using family-provided photographs and footage from his final years. The result shows the character aging across the film's timeline.

Even Kilmer's voice, damaged by a tracheal procedure during his cancer treatment, was reconstructed using AI. There's an intentional poetic echo built into the story: Father Fintan also suffers from tuberculosis, mirroring the condition that shaped Kilmer's real final years.

"His family kept saying how important they thought the movie was and that Val really wanted to be a part of this," Voorhees told Variety. "It was that support that gave me the confidence to say, okay, let's do this."

Kilmer appears in "a significant part" of the finished film. The ensemble also includes Abigail Lawrie, Tom Felton, Wes Studi, and Abigail Breslin. Production stretched across six years due to COVID-related shutdowns before finally reaching completion.

The project sits at the intersection of grief, consent, and AI capability — raising questions the industry has been debating since digital de-aging became routine: when does preservation become performance? The difference here is that the family said yes.