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Matthew McConaughey Is Protecting His Image With A Trademark
Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures // Illustration by Kate Walker
Actor, author, and all-around icon Matthew McConaughey is trying to protect himself from deepfakes by trademarking himself.
The Big Picture: Stamping out deepfakes is becoming an overwhelming problem for everyone — especially celebrities, who are playing Whac-A-Mole to stop bad actors (not the performance kind) from fraudulently monetizing their name, image, and likeness. Without federal legislation in place, they’re being forced to try out-of-the-box ideas to stem the reputational damage.
Behind The Filing: Making deepfakes of McConaughey is definitely not “alright, alright, alright.”
The WSJ reports that over the past several months, McConaughey “has had eight trademark applications approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office featuring him staring, smiling, and talking.”
Those filings include a seven-second clip of the Oscar winner standing on a porch, a three-second clip of him sitting in front of a Christmas tree, and audio of his classic Dazed and Confused line: “Alright, alright, alright.”
The hope is that if something AI-generated featuring McConaughey surfaces, it’s being done with his express permission — like using ElevenLabs software to translate his Lyrics of Livin’ newsletter into Spanish.
And if content is uploaded without his permission, it can be more easily taken down — even if the deepfakes aren’t selling anything directly… although that would still be a novel argument in court, according to McConaughey’s own lawyers.
Last Line: While some celebrities have trademarked certain catchphrases (Lizzo with “100% That Bitch” and Paris Hilton with “That’s Hot”), McConaughey seems to be the first to pursue an overarching trademark of himself. McConaughey knows he’s worth his weight in gold, making this a proactive move to protect his core work tools — his face, his voice, his sign off.
Otherwise, it would only be a matter of time before McConaughey was pulled into a scandal of some random YouTuber’s making.
The Future: CAA is doing something similar to McConaughey with all of its clients via its CAA Vault… so it’s likely just a question of when the agency will file trademark applications for all of its A-list clients. You know, just in case.
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited, Polled, & Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.