Rachael, a replicant and Rick Deckard's love interest, is a key character in Blade Runner. Though replicants cannot age, she appears in the sequel looking exactly as she did in the original 1982 film. The studio MPC shows in a video how they recreated Rachael for Blade Runner 2049.
A Worthy Successor
To be honest, I didn't have much faith in Blade Runner 2049. Messing with a cult classic more than thirty years after its release didn't seem like a good idea, but after seeing it on the big screen I was impressed: it's undoubtedly a worthy successor and continuation of the original, deepening and expanding the story. Visually it's stunning, with some of the best CGI ever seen. In fact, the film won several awards, including an Oscar, for Best Visual Effects. And even greater was my surprise when Rachael (Sean Young) appeared on screen, looking exactly as she did in 1982.
How They Recreated Rachael
This video from Movie Picture Company, the production studio responsible for the visual effects of Blade Runner 2049, shows how they recreated Rachael for this sequel. It essentially involved using English actress Loren Peta (Rash) on set, scanning both her face and Sean Young's, and closely studying Rachael's gestures from the original film. Young's image was digitally superimposed onto Peta, who was trained by Sean to recreate her performance for a brief scene and portray a replicant designed by Niander Wallace to be physically identical to the same Rachael we saw in Blade Runner.
A Year of Work for Two Minutes
Visual effects supervisor John Nelson says the two-minute sequence took a year to complete. However, all the work was worth it. When watching the film, especially that scene, the first thing you think is that they found an actress who looks exactly like Sean Young; you would never imagine that the character was generated by a computer. The only flaws are the color of her eyes and a few moments where the muscles around her mouth seemed ever so slightly off. Even so, there's no doubt that this replica of Rachael is a thousand times better than Princess Leia at the end of Rogue One.
