If you enjoyed this article, explore our ongoing series: “Mods, Moneyshots, and Morals: The Unregulated World of Celebrity Deepfakes.” Disclaimer: Mondomonger is a pseudonym. No actual Karen Gillan performances were harmed in the making of this article, though her digital likeness remains, for now, unprotected.
Karen Gillan herself remains silent. But her digital ghost—rendered, cloned, re-voiced, and multiplied across a thousand films she never actually made—speaks for itself. In Fan-Topia, the actress is no longer a person. She is a palette. Fan-Topia.Mondomonger.Deepfakes.Karen.Gillan.as...
When asked about Fan-Topia deepfakes, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director, told Variety : “An unauthorized deepfake of a performer is a harm, regardless of whether it comes from a studio or a hobbyist. The law must evolve to recognize that.” If you enjoyed this article, explore our ongoing
The unofficial project—dubbed by fans as “Gillan Everywhere All At Once” —poses a provocative question: What if Karen Gillan had played every major female role in the last twenty years of blockbuster cinema? But as Mondomonger’s deepfakes go viral, crossing the line from niche tribute to ethical firestorm, we are forced to ask: Is Fan-Topia a liberation or a violation? For decades, fandom was reactive. You watched a movie, bought a t-shirt, wrote a forum post. Today, fandom is generative. With AI video synthesis, voice cloning, and open-source rendering engines, the consumer has become the curator. not individual fans in their basements.
Mondomonger, reached via encrypted email, disagrees. “I am not stealing,” they wrote. “I am celebrating. Karen Gillan is a chameleon. She has the range to play every role I put her in. The deepfakes aren’t to replace Johansson or Theron. They are visual essays proving Gillan’s versatility. Fan-Topia is about showing what could have been .”
Moreover, Gillan represents the almost-cast . Rumor has it she auditioned for Captain Marvel, for Lara Croft, for the new Star Wars lead. Mondomonger’s deepfakes serve as a “visual rebuttal” to casting directors who passed her over. In one video, titled “Karen Gillan as Elizabeth Swan” , the algorithm redubs Keira Knightley’s lines with a Scottish lilt. It is brilliant. It is also unsettling. The timing of Mondomonger’s rise coincides with Hollywood’s most aggressive crackdown on AI. The 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike explicitly won protections against digital replicas without “informed consent and compensation.” Yet those rules govern studios, not individual fans in their basements.