Rusty Goffe played an Oompa-Loompa in the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and five decades later he found himself on a new set listening to his old co-star speak again. “I did shed a tear when I first heard it, because I loved the man so much,” Goffe told Variety. The voice belonged to Gene Wilder, dead since 2016, rebuilt by artificial intelligence.
The show is Wonka’s the Golden Ticket, a reality competition that Netflix launched Sept. 23, built around the Willy Wonka story and the first children’s book to become a reality series. There is no in-person host. Instead, a disembodied AI reproduction of Wilder’s voice, developed with the AI audio company ElevenLabs, floats in to announce challenges and dismiss losing contestants.
The pretense of the series is that contestants are given a tour of the Wonka factory, at the end of which one winner receives what the show calls a lifetime supply of money. The contestants are adults rather than the children of the book, and their exits are framed not as punishment but as losses in whatever games the series proposes.
Netflix obtained the blessing of Wilder’s estate, and the show carries a disclaimer noting that permission. But the choice has drawn sharp criticism. The Los Angeles Times called the voice “lifeless,” writing that the effect was “not so much from beyond the grave as buried in it.” The technology outlet TechRadar argued the decision was disrespectful to the dead and did nothing for the program itself.
The reaction split neatly. Goffe, who now stars in the new series alongside his son Ben, welcomed the voice, saying he was pleased Netflix had done it. “He is Mr. Wonka. He is Willy Wonka. Gene Wilder is Willy Wonka,” he said. To him, hearing Wilder again was a tribute to a man he loved. To critics, it was a ghoulish shortcut around casting a living actor.
Netflix has defended the choice on creative grounds. “So it became clear to us that Gene Wilder was perhaps the only voice that could do this,” the company said. The defense has not settled the debate, and some fans noted that Wilder himself had criticized the 2005 remake of Wonka, suggesting he might not have signed off had he been alive.
Wilder, who died in 2016 at 83, built a career on manic, melancholy comic roles — Willy Wonka, Dr. Frankenstein, the Waco Kid — and retired from acting in the 1990s to write novels. His voice, soft and slightly frayed, became one of the most recognizable in American comedy, which is precisely what made it attractive to reproduce.
The dispute sits inside a larger argument the entertainment industry has been having since the Hollywood strikes of 2023, when the use of artificial intelligence to reproduce performers became a flashpoint. SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, secured provisions in its 2023 contract requiring consent and compensation for the digital replication of performers. Those protections cover living members and their estates, and the Wilder case shows the framework being tested in practice rather than in theory.
Wilder’s case is legally cleaner than many. The estate approved, his widow supported it, and Wilder is a figure whose voice is inseparable from the role being recreated. Critics such as TechRadar and the Los Angeles Times argue that a clean legal path does not make the artistic choice good, and that a synthetic voice cannot carry the warmth the original performance had.
There is also a commercial logic beneath the controversy. An AI voice is cheaper than a living actor, takes direction without objection, and never ages out of a role. Netflix has not disclosed what it paid for the recreation, but ElevenLabs markets voice cloning as a fraction of the cost of talent, and the company is under pressure to deliver family franchises while cutting costs.
The show’s own cast embodies the tension. Goffe, who began his career on the original film and said he was ending it on this one, heard something moving in the recreation. Others heard a hollow echo. The divide is less about the technology, analysts said, than about what a dead actor’s voice is owed.
For Hollywood, the Wonka experiment is a live case study in what audiences will accept. A dead actor’s estate, a technology partner and a streaming platform can now resurrect a voice in weeks, and the only real gatekeepers are public taste and a show’s reviews. The reviews so far suggest the technology outpaced the judgment.
For now, the audience verdict is still forming, but the critical one is in: a technical achievement that many found hollow. Whether that matters commercially remains to be seen, since reality television survives bad reviews routinely and a familiar voice may draw viewers regardless of what critics write. What the Wonka case has already done is draw a public line around a question the industry had been settling in private: how far a platform can go with the voice of someone who can no longer say no.
