See How Talking Portraits Bring the Greatest Living Shakespearean Actors to Life

An exhibition at the Red Eight Gallery in London is immortalizing the greatest Shakespearean actors of our time through portraits that can blink, breathe and rattle off soliloquies.

For hundreds of years, artists have captured the theater’s greatest actors through portraiture. The new show, titled “The Shakespeare Portraits (Act I),” aims to update the practice by bringing the thespians to life using state-of-the-art technology.

The show includes ten digital portraits of contemporary actors—including celebrities like Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen—reciting lines from various Shakespeare plays. However, the portraits are not just small films that play on loop. Artnet’s Richard Whiddington writes that they’re “not dissimilar from Harry Potter’s living portraits” that move and capture the subject's mannerisms.

Michael Billington, a critic for the Guardian, writes that he was “struck by the intimacy of the experience.”

“I sat beneath a large, framed image of Ian McKellen, and as I spoke to the exhibition’s creative director, Arsalan Sattari-Hicks, I realised that Sir Ian’s head was occasionally moving, that his gaze was subtly shifting and his features expressing a variety of emotions,” he adds.

The portraits were made by StageBlock, a tech studio that creates new kinds of interactive art. The actors worked with the studio, “posing” for a camera and reciting their lines.

Museumgoers can hear the speeches by pressing a button. Each of the ten actors infuses their own spin on their chosen Shakespeare text, giving viewers an up-close look at how they bring the Bard’s lines to life.

“Ian McKellen delivers ‘all the world’s a stage’ from As You Like It, Derek Jacobi offers up Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be,’” writes Artnet. “Harriet Walter turns to Prospero’s ‘Ye elves of hill’ from The Tempest, David Suchet performs Macbeth’s infamous lines on the futility of life ‘tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ (a role Suchet has never played).”

The Shakespeare Portraits by Stage Block

Watch on

StageBlock is hoping that viewers will not only see the novelty in the new pieces, but also treat them as lasting works of art that can be hung in galleries and sold to interested buyers.

“It’s a bold, visionary new idea for the digital age, but I hope it won’t stifle the talent of the individual portraitist,” writes Billington of the Guardian. “I cherish the notion of, say, Salvador Dalí’s painting of Olivier as Richard III hanging on a gallery wall alongside the mesmerizing image of McKellen looking on at one in watchful fascination.”

The tech company also plans to make an Act II of the show, which will feature a second round of Shakespearean actors in new digital portraits next year.

“This collection is the culmination of profound collaborations with some of the most iconic actors of our time,” says Sattari-Hicks in a statement. “This is only the beginning, with many renowned home-grown and international talents already in line for future collections.”

“The Shakespeare Portraits (Act I)” is on view at the Red Eight Gallery in London through January 10, 2025.

Julia Binswanger | READ MORE

Julia Binswanger is a freelance arts and culture reporter based in Chicago. Her work has been featured in WBEZ, Chicago magazine, Rebellious magazine and PC magazine.