Glenn Close is in Ryan Murphy’s new series All’s Fair, about an all-women law firm. You know who else is in it? Kim Kardashian. I cannot wait to see their scenes together; Glenn will either raise Kim up with her or expose Kim’s lack of… let’s go with “experience,” and either way it will be camp perfection. Anyway, All’s Fair is still filming, but Glenn was granted leave to attend the Sundance Film Festival. She doesn’t have anything premiering this year, she just wanted to be on hand to celebrate Sundance Institute executive Michelle Satter at a fundraising gala on Friday. While on the red carpet for that event, Glenn spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about a trifecta of crises leaving her struggling “to keep my equilibrium.” They are the new administration, the LA wildfires, and AI.
“I’m very lucky to have a job. There were so many people impacted in L.A. already, and then now with the fires. I was astounded at how few jobs there are in our profession. I’m a big reader of history and unfortunately, I think not enough people in this country understand the history and what we’ve just gotten ourselves into. That’s very dangerous,” Close explained. “On top of that is [artificial intelligence]. What is going to be truth? What is true is going to be a big question.”
Close said she’s just finished reading Yuval Noah Harari’s book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI, which she found “incredible” and “more terrifying than anything I’ve read.” AI has also become something of a hot-button issue in Hollywood, and THR asked Close for her take.
“Depends on how it’s handled,” she said. “I don’t want my image or my voice to be reconstructed. I mean, people need jobs. It’s a sad dilemma. Is it progress that less people will work because of it? I don’t know. I think we’re losing one thing that a place like Sundance and what Michelle [Satter] has done is so important — stories about what it means to be a human being. We have to cling to that. We have to keep coming back and be inspired by things that teach us, that help us with our emotions to know what it means to be human and [to always] to look into somebody else’s eyes — not a screen — but another human being’s eyes. If we lose that, it’ll be a very slippery slope, I’m afraid.”
Asked how she keeps up the momentum or fixes her focus back on positivity, Close looked up. “The sun comes up every day. We’re very lucky about that,” she said. “I also am learning. I wean myself off spending a lot of time on the phone. You can fall into that Instagram hole and all of a sudden two hours, three hours have gone by and you think, what have I done with my life? It’s also really bad for your brain.”
I mean, of course Glenn Close is reading a tome called Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI. After all, this is the woman who enjoys brushing up on geography and geopolitics in her downtime! As for her comments on AI, first of all, she needs to put it down in writing that she does not want AI to build an ersatz Glenn if/when she’s no longer with us (yes, I said “if!”). Her wishes would legally be upheld at least in California, where they passed a bill requiring consent for AI replicas of deceased artists. And then yes, her larger point about AI taking away human jobs is salient. For one thing, AI has so far proven itself to have major faulty wiring when it comes to fact checking. May I remind you of the Megaflopolis trailer ascribing fake quotes to real critics, or the Elphaba & Glinda Barbie boxes directing kids & parents to visit a pr0n site instead of the Wicked movie site? Adult supervision is still required. So which is more expensive: investing fortunes in getting this technology to operate nearly as well as a working human, or paying decent living wages to actual humans? Wait wait, don’t tell me which one the millionaire tech bros favor.
Photos credit: Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Avalon, IMAGO/Jennifer Bloc/Avalon, Nicky Nelson/Wenn/Avalon,