For most of Hollywood history, the word “actor” required little explanation. Actors search for emotional truth in imaginary lives. They work with directors and scene partners, endure 4 a.m. call times and, when everything works out, thank their agents and collect awards.
Tilly Norwood did none of these things. That’s because Tilly only exists as code and pixels.
The announcement last week that Tilly — the AI-generated character who debuted last year to intense backlash from actors and unions — would star in an upcoming feature film titled “Misaligned” sparked a debate not just about AI’s impact on Hollywood workplaces, but about something even more fundamental: What exactly is Tilly? Some objected to referring to the digital character as “she” or “her.” Others rejected the idea that Tilly could even be called an actress.
The debate quickly expanded to include readers’ comments on the Times’ coverage of the project. One commenter urged journalists to “stop writing about this thing like it’s a person.” Another asked: “Why isn’t this just an animated film?” A third objected: “She is NOT an AI actress, she is an AI software program.” But not everyone balked. “I’m buying a ticket,” wrote one reader. “She’s very pretty.”
Overall, the reactions showed how uncertain the language surrounding AI has become. No one has ever confused Woody from “Toy Story” with Tom Hanks or Elsa from “Frozen” with Idina Menzel, or suggested that the characters themselves deserve acting awards. The Tilly concept tests whether these assumptions still apply. If audiences laugh and cry at what they see on screen, who deserves the credit – the AI, the filmmakers behind it, or both? And where exactly does the power come from?
Eline van der Velden, who started out as an actress before turning to filmmaking and AI, said Thursday via video call from the London headquarters of Particle6 — the AI entertainment startup that invented Tilly — that she understood why many actors reacted so strongly.
“I completely understand the fear,” she says. “I had the same fear when AI first came out. I didn’t invent the technology. I don’t wish it were here. But it’s here. My way of dealing with it is to go along with it.”
The planned feature film is set in a surreal digital world that its creators call the “Tillyverse” and which he describes as a coming-of-age dramedy. It’s about Tilly, an AI creature with no experience of her own who gradually develops desires, ambitions and even shame as she becomes more and more human.
The AI-generated Tilly Norwood was designed with a variety of scenarios in mind: romantic comedies, dramas and indies. This image is AI generated.
(Particle6)
Van der Velden compares Tilly to a character like Cinderella. Just as audiences naturally refer to the Disney princess as “she,” she says it feels natural to think of Tilly in the same way. She doesn’t think the pronouns are important.
“People can call them whatever they want,” she says, shrugging. “I don’t take offense when they call her ‘It’.”
The label that she cares about the most is actor. Van der Velden imagines Tilly not as a single fictional character, but as a performer who could appear in anything from a costume drama to a monster movie to a music video.
“The reason I called her an actress was because I didn’t want to limit myself to one character,” she says. “I just created my own little Barbie doll and I want to play around with her.”
According to Van der Velden, creating a Tilly performance is a collaborative process that combines acting, AI guidance and traditional filmmaking. Van der Velden and other actors help develop the character’s backstory, voice and emotional life, and in some cases contribute to performance and motion capture work. The creative team then reviews and refines multiple AI-generated versions of a scene before deciding which expressions and line readings best fit the story.
“This is where the critical human eye comes into play,” says Van der Velden. “Decision making is important. That’s creativity.”
Eline van der Velden, creator of the AI Tilly Norwood, is a former actress turned filmmaker and technology strategist.
(Particle6)
Even its creators don’t always know what Tilly will do next. Van der Velden says that watching different AI-generated versions of a scene can sometimes feel like discovering an unexpectedly inspired take from a human actor. “I’ll give you a glitch roll one day,” she says, laughing. “Honestly, she does the craziest things.”
Van der Velden disputes the idea of Tilly replacing actors. “I have no interest in Tilly taking on a role that a real actor could play in a real movie,” she says. In fact, the project actually created new jobs, including for actors.
“We have increased our workforce sixfold,” she says of Particle6, which now has more than 30 employees. Van der Velden says the company also works with Hollywood directors and producers who have asked not to be named publicly for fear of backlash. “We created jobs for filmmakers, including actors, who are great at developing characters and backstories — how that person would think, how they would say a line,” she says. “Those skills still matter. That’s the biggest misunderstanding.”
Critics, including SAG-AFTRA leadership, counter that the displacement is already occurring in more subtle ways, with background roles and commercials increasingly being filled by digital doppelgangers rather than human actors. For the actors’ union, the objection goes deeper than any individual role or AI-generated advertising. It’s about what actually counts as performance.
“Let’s be clear: Tilly Norwood is not a person,” SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin and National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland jointly wrote in a message to members in October. “It is a synthetic construct generated by software.” They argued that such systems rely on the work of countless professional artists without their permission, credit or compensation, and that audiences ultimately connect not with algorithms but with artists because “performances have always been a reflection of our shared humanity.”
Actress Justine Bateman goes even tougher. Bateman is best known for his role as Mallory Keaton in Family Ties. He later became a filmmaker, earning a degree in computer science from UCLA and founding CREDO 23, a film festival dedicated to presenting and certifying films made without AI.
For Bateman, no amount of convincing mimicry changes the fact that an AI character has never actually experienced the emotions it is portraying.
Actress and filmmaker Justine Bateman, a staunch opponent of AI adoption in Hollywood, believes that every human role should be played by a human actor.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
“It should be absolutely non-negotiable — if you have a character in your film that is human, it has to be played by a human actor,” Bateman, a former SAG-AFTRA board member, told The Times last year.
Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts and former editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter, sees Tilly in an uncomfortable middle ground. He compares Tilly to Pixar’s computer-animated characters – another leap in technology that was initially met with resistance before being accepted as a legitimate form of on-screen performance.
“Yes, it’s a kind of performance,” says Galloway. “Tilly is not an actor and yet it is a performance. It is a strange paradox.”
Nevertheless, he sees a crucial difference.
“We go into a film wanting to believe,” he says. “We are willing to see the same person in different situations – Brad Pitt or any movie star – because they allow us to pretend they are someone else and identify with them. If it is a completely computerized creation, the odds are completely against it. You will never believe that Tilly Norwood is a real person in a real situation that we identify with and care about. Reality remains too fake to accept.”
Galloway says he saw that resistance this spring when Chapman University hosted a symposium examining AI’s impact on entertainment. After it was announced in promotional materials that Tilly would appear, the school was flooded with emails from people who incorrectly assumed that the AI character was being presented as the equivalent of a celebrity masterclass.
“We had masterclasses with The Rock and Ariana Grande,” he remembers. “Suddenly there was this wildfire: ‘How dare you do a masterclass with Tilly Norwood?’ People were more upset about Tilly than anything that was going on in Washington.”
Whatever happens to Tilly, it likely won’t be audiences’ last encounter with an AI-generated character. AI-generated influencers, virtual personalities and digital performers are already on the rise online as entertainment companies continue to experiment with AI-generated characters.
Bateman fears that audiences may eventually not care whether the performance is by a human or an AI. “If you’ve only fed them junk food and then put beautiful, Michelin-starred food in front of them, it seems foreign to them,” she says.
For Bateman, the difference is not just aesthetic; it is human.
“AI has gotten better at all the weird human behavior — the little head tilts and hesitations and body language,” she says. “But when you hear someone singing live who has this gift, who has this instrument in their throat, it’s remarkable. It hits the human soul.”
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2026-07-13/tilly-norwood-starring-role-actor-hollywood-wrestles-with-ai
