A deepfake Tom Cruise goes viral on TikTok

A TikTok account called @deeptomcruise began posting short videos in late February 2021 that combined AI face-swapping software with the real-time performance of Cruise impersonator Miles Fisher, who supplied the body, voice and comic timing while the software substituted Cruise’s face. A clip was widely reshared from 25 February, entertainment outlets picked the story up within a day or two, and the series passed 11 million views on TikTok.

What distinguished the clips from earlier deepfakes was that they held up under motion — turning heads, changing light, even a golf swing — conditions that had reliably broken older face-swap tools. Their creator, Belgian visual-effects artist Chris Ume, said the polish came from weeks of manual compositing layered on top of the machine-learning output rather than from the model alone. A digital-forensics researcher at UC Berkeley, quoted by Fortune, called the results “incredibly well done.”

Ume did not present the videos as real — the account name and captions made the joke explicit — and he said his aim was to demonstrate how good the technology had become rather than to deceive anyone. He went on to found a company, Metaphysic, built on the same technique. Even so, the episode became a reference point in public discussion of synthetic video: the moment a convincing deepfake of a named celebrity reached a mass audience through an ordinary consumer app, rather than a research demo or a niche forum. It was cited for years afterward as shorthand for how far the technology had come, well before the same underlying methods were used with no comedic framing at all, including to spread sexual deepfakes of Taylor Swift three years later.