Actors, whether they like to or not, often become associated with a line or phrase they utter in a film. A film buff knows who to associate with: “Hasta la vista, baby,” or “Pushpa, I hate tears”, or “You talkin’ to me?” The way they say it, the intonations, the turn of the syllable, the swagger of the lips and body, all become imprinted in pop culture. Thus, “Jhakaas” has Anil Kapoor written all over it, just as “Bhidu” has Jackie Shroff and Matthew McConaughey walked straight out of the 1990s cool and into our imaginations with his “alright, alright, alright.”
For years, these lines have been fandom currency, appearing from memes to T-shirts, and parody reels to stand-up callbacks. Then along came.. not Polly, but AI and said: “Nice pneumonic you got there. It would be a shame not to infinitely replicate it.” That is when the non-proverbial poop blocked the non-existent air conditioner for the stars who uttered these catchphrases.
Anil Kapoor’s Jhakaas vs. the Machine: In 2023, Anil Kapoor marched into the courts with a lawyer and essentially declared: “I am not open-source.” The Delhi High Court agreed that his name, face, voice, and yes, everyone’s beloved “jhakaas,” were legally protected aspects of his persona and just like that, that one word became a perimeter fence which you could shout in your living room, but couldn’t legally turn AI-Anil into a dancing, deepfaked endorsement factory of any product or service without his consent.
As has been the case for nearly half a century, the zeitgeist was strong with Anil on this one, as his case came at a very particular moment. Hollywood was in the middle of twin strikes first launched by the Writers Guild of America and then SAG-AFTRA, with writers and actors fighting over streaming and AI. In the middle of Hollywood’s existential chaos landed Anil Kapoor, who had inadvertently beta-tested a solution to at least some of the actor's predicament: he hadn’t just protected his performance, but himself as a bundle of rights.
That landed Kapoor on the cover of Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in AI, alongside the greatest Silicon Valley icon. The message was clear: in the age of AI, your greatest assets are identifiers of your identity, and you'd better get your paperwork in order to protect them.
Matthew McConaughey’s Texan Clause: Cut to a few years later, and we now have Matthew McConaughey, patron saint of uber chill, who looks around and finds the digital world filled with AI models remixing his voice, mannerism and most importantly his three “alrights” from his debut 1993 film, Dazed and Confused, to promote all kinds of stuff. So, McConaughey does the most un-McConaughey thing imaginable: he trademarks the phrase. And just like that, “Alright, alright, alright” goes from being a stoner improvisation of an unlikely star to a legal tripwire if you choose to use it. Overnight, what used to be a friendly greeting for talk‑show hosts became a line that comes with potential licensing fees, usage terms, and possibly a strongly worded email from someone in his legal team if you drop it into an AI ad without asking.
Call it the American remake of the Anil Kapoor story with the same underlying plot: “Stop turning my persona into an AI sandbox without consent”, but shot in a different legal system with more denim and many more pickup trucks.
Filmmakers vs. Infinite Copy‑Paste: Both cases expose a fundamental shift in how filmmaking has, well, shifted. In the past, the contract was simple: the actor gave their time, face, and performance; the camera recorded; the movie came out; the makers went home; the viewers went to the theatres. Today, the camera has become just the first capture device, one meant to feed another: AI. The real ‘performer’ might become the machine learning system trained on hours of the actor’s face, voice, expressions, which can reproduce alternate scenes, languages, or entirely new projects the actor had never agreed to in the first place.
It is not an easy place to be as an actor, as they wake up to three uncomfortable truths. First is that their recognisable traits – catchphrases, signature laughs, iconic gestures, specific mannerisms – are more than simple quirks; they’re revenue-generating assets. Second, the problem is that AI can remix and replicate those traits ad nauseam without requiring the actor to be physically present. This leads to the third most disconcerting truth of all: once an actor's persona is in the wild, the line between “homage” and “exploitation” gets blurrier.
So Kapoor and McConaughey are doing what any seasoned producer would: lock down the IP. And it’s not about greed either. They are doing so because they, their looks, and everything about them have become hooks that AI and brands can hang infinite content on without their consent and against their core beliefs. What they are doing is not just protecting a line or their persona, but they’re protecting every possible derivative of their persona used in contexts they’d never approve.
Europe’s Shows The Way: Kapoor and McConaughey aren’t the only ones who need protection. As I had written before in this piece, everyone in the public domain needs it, from heads of state to religious figures, and today, you must include influencers and even those of us with just our family on our social media, filled with our videos and images. Anyone can be replicated by AI and used in ways they won’t approve. Hence, a growing list of countries, particularly in Europe, have started taking “personality rights” seriously.
In many of these jurisdictions, the law has begun to recognise something broader than just copyright or trademarks: a right that includes your image, your voice, your name, and your overall likeness. Think of it like a full‑body IP armour where, beyond just trademark protection to a “jhakaas” or “alright, alright, alright” as phrases in specific commercial categories, strong personality rights go further and ask if a face is recognisable, voice or manner of speaking distinctive, and if the AI replica evokes you even if it is technically new content.
If yes, those rights often give you a say and a veto over how that representation is used, especially for commercial or exploitative purposes, with some European systems stretching it to cover your image in ads or merchandise you didn’t agree to, deepfakes that look and sound like you and AI-generated endorsements with your face and voice selling something without your consent. In many of these, they even give posthumous control, where your estate controls how your persona appears long after you’re gone.
Strong personality‑rights thus don’t just protect a single line but throw a legal blanket over the whole package: catchphrases, expressions, silhouette, vocal style, the lot. If such a system existed in India and the US, neither Kapoor nor McConaughey would have had to fight line by line or phrase by phrase. And that is the future all of us should be heading towards, where there is one comprehensive right to protect our individuality.
For filmmakers and filmmaking, these laws, and the Kapoor-McConaughey legal bindings points to a new contract between performers, technology and the audience. Even for filmmakers, it means that if they want to de-age an actor with AI, they had better have explicit consent. The same goes for the resurrection of an actor in a film sequel, or for building a franchise around a character indistinguishable from a real star.
And you know what? That might not be such a bad thing after all. Quite the reverse. It is something you could say ‘Jhakaas’ and ‘alright, alright, alright’ to. But only after you have approval from Kapoor McConaughey and Sons.