Matthew McConaughey now has an AI voice clone

Celebrities launched tequila and athleisure brands; now they’re launching digital versions of themselves. Matthew McConaughey skipped straight to the 2025 upgrade: an AI voice model capable of producing endless, multilingual McConaughey-isms, one perfectly calibrated “okay, okay, okay” at a time. The drawling voice survived the transfer.

Its digital voice now resides within ElevenLabs, the audio-AI startup founded by former Google researcher Piotr Dąbrowski and former Palantir engineer Mati Staniszewski. The company has spent the last year signing some of the world’s most recognizable voices to its new “Iconic Voice Marketplace,” a sort of talent library and licensing hub where brands can request access to celebrity voice likenesses for approved projects. McConaughey, who is also an investor in the company, says he plans to use the model to read his newsletter, Lyrics of Livin’, in Spanish.

Michael Caine also joined the roster, giving ElevenLabs two of Hollywood’s most unmistakable framerates to showcase as proof of concept. Most of the other participants are deceased – sports legends, historical figures and a handful of legacy stars whose estates have agreed to a synthetic rebirth. For the company, it is a talent library. For celebrities, it’s passive income. For everyone else, perhaps it’s the creeping feeling that the line between a voice and a product is disappearing.

Unlike the site’s more DIY tools — where regular users can generate their own clones or choose from a shared voice library — these celebrity voices live behind a permissions-based licensing system. Brands submit an application, ElevenLabs negotiates the terms and only projects explicitly approved by the actor (or their representatives) move forward.

And the practical result is stranger than any abstract debate. A robocall to refill a prescription might arrive with Caine’s sweet note of paternal disappointment. If a brand wants a McConaughey voiceover in Portuguese, they can request one. If a publisher wants their audiobook to be narrated in Japanese, they can request that too. Theoretically (and for the right price), your next credit card fraud alert could arrive sounding like you’re about to deliver a monologue; a weather app could warn you of a cold snap with the severity of Oscar night — while the real McConaughey is somewhere else entirely, not saying a word.

Meanwhile, performance-minded people start to panic. Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro has dismissed generative AI as just a “semi-convincing screen saver” and said he would “rather die” than use it in his films. “Breaking Bad” creator Vince Gilligan, an architect of character and human issues, called the technology “the most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine in the world.” Scarlett Johansson, who brought an AI to life in Spike Jonze’s “Her,” confronted OpenAI after posting an “eerily similar” voice for ChatGPT. Morgan Freeman, whose voice has been usurped by half of the Internet for years, is now suing for unauthorized copies of AI. His lawyers, he said, have been “very, very busy” tracking down copycats.

This may just be the next celebrity product launch. Or maybe it’s the moment when Hollywood’s most recognizable voices slipped out of reach of their own bodies. Either way, the future can now come with a familiar, digitized Texas drawl.