SKF brings Greta Garbo back for an AI ad about bearings

From a teenage extra to a digital spokesperson

In the ad, Garbo appears in a silk blouse and elegant trousers, lit like a film star. She first arrives as a dreamy profile, then stands beside a stool. Before the sales copy begins, she delivers lines about filming, including a check on whether the cameras are ready. Then she praises SKF bearings in a monotone, ending with a strained joke about her famous wish to be alone.

The connection to the original 1921 film is real, though indirect. Garbo appeared in it before her acting career took off; the film seems to have been tied to an advertisement for women’s clothing she modeled for Stockholm department store PUB. The new commercial says her first film was made for SKF and presents this as a return. The claim is doing more work than the history can support: a short appearance in an early advertising film is not the same as a relationship with the company.

The digital performance is built around Garbo’s supposed “smoothness,” a quality SKF connects to the free rotation of its bearings. But her appeal was never just a matter of smooth movement or polished delivery. The ad reproduces her cool hauteur, languid sensuality and deadpan humor as surface traits, then puts them to work reading humorless industrial copy. The result is less a revived actor than an exceptionally refined television-shopping host.

The rights question behind the resurrection

The commercial reportedly uses images and photographs from sources other than Garbo’s films. That may have spared SKF from negotiating with the studios that own film copyrights and might be reluctant to let her image be used freely. Instead, the company needed permission from Garbo’s distant relatives. They reportedly have no objection to licensing her digital likeness for other films.

I think the permission is the more consequential part of this story. A family’s willingness to license an image does not answer what makes a posthumous performance feel respectful, or who gets to decide when a person’s likeness has been used enough. The ad offers little sign that it has considered those questions; it treats a complex screen persona as a set of recognizable mannerisms that can be attached to a product.

The same route could be available for other stars. Distant relatives of Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper or Rita Hayworth might also approve similar projects. That possibility is not proof that any such deal exists. It is a reminder that the boundary may be set less by the wishes of the dead than by the living people who control access to their likenesses.

The 1921 appearance gave SKF a reason to make this ad. It does not make the result feel like a meaningful return. If digital likenesses can be licensed into service of almost any pitch, restraint will matter as much as the technology.