Hollywood Tells UK's "It Girl" to Get Lost
Tilly Norwood has it all—and Tinsel Town is having none of it.
Actress Tilly Norwood arrived in the U.S. the way many British ingenues do: with perfect hair, a beguiling smile, and a reel that proves she can play any role from a Cornish fishmonger to the Marchioness of Winchester. She’s already huge in the U.K., has a posh accent that sounds like tea learning to speak, and—judging by the industry chatter that’s made it all the way to the mainstream—has managed to enrage every working actor in Los Angeles in under 72 hours.
Icon status: instant.
Norwood is pretty in a Katie Holmes/Reese Witherspoon sort of way (not smoldery in the Angelina Jolie/Sofia Vergara sense), oozing innocent, girl-next-door charm. Her Instagram feed is almost relatable—a tangle of nervous pre-audition pep talks, Starbucks selfies, and giddy “I got it!” posts. Her résumé boasts she’s “never missed a day of work;” directors say she’s a dream to work with.
“[Norwood] has Bette Davis’ attitude and Humphrey Bogart’s lips,” whined Whoopi Goldberg, who happens to have a rabid badger’s attitude and an otherwise unremarkable smacker. “It’s a little bit of an unfair advantage.”
“Tilly is not an actress,” The Hollywood Reporter wrote. “She’s a tool.”
Her critics aren’t being cruel; they’re being literal: Tilly is not human. She is an AI-generated “actress”—a pixel-perfect protagonist who hits every mark, never forgets a line, and is highly unlikely to embarrass her handlers by getting arrested for DUI or hooking up with her married co-star. She never ages. She can do her own stunts. She doesn’t need a rider or a trailer. She can star in six (or six hundred) projects at once, conduct media interviews in any language, and is immune to jet lag and negative press. In an industry that worships perfection, she is functionally flawless.
Tilly’s creator, London-based production studio Particle6, has been teasing her arrival on the scene since July, but it wasn’t until a recent interview in a British trade publication—where Particle6 CEO and founder Eline Van der Velden mentioned that the synthetic performer is in talks [as it were] with several talent agencies—that Hollywood’s mood ring went instantly black.
“This is literally the mark of the end of the industry as we know it,” filmmaker Luca Guadagnegro wrote on X. “Good Lord, we’re screwed,” is how actress Emily Blunt put it. SAG-AFTRA, the labor union that represents actors and other creatives, thundered about “synthetics”—which sounds like the opening act at Coachella but is, in fact, the legitimate fear of being replaced by software modeled on your (unpaid) labor.
Welcome to the party, Hollywood. Of course you’d be fashionably late.
“‘Tilly Norwood’ is a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers—without permission or compensation,” a SAG-AFTRA statement read. “It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion and, from what we’ve seen, audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience. It doesn’t solve any ‘problem’—it creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry.”
Audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience? Explain South Park, Family Guy, Futurama, the Simpsons. And let’s be real (pun intended): Hollywood is powered by fake boobs, fake tans, fake butts, fake hair, fake lips, fake nails, fake relationships, fake names, and fake accents… but put them all together and suddenly it’s sacrilege?
What’s funny is the indignation. After all, the entertainment industry is already using AI for half of their tasks, and borrowing is essentially the entire business model: steal everyone’s homework, jumble it in a digital blender, and then serve it back up like it’s Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry. It doesn’t “create” so much as it cyber-quilts—stitching together bits of pilfered art, plagiarized writing, purloined performances, even co-opted bad ideas (yes, Karen, your fan fiction is in there, too). Bellyaching that an AI actress is built on other people’s work is like moaning that a dictionary is filled with words. That’s the point.
Actors are hardly the first group to get cliffed by “innovation.” Musicians watched streaming turn royalties into tip jars. Copywriters woke up to clients saying, “We love your work; can you just prompt the robot and charge half?” Uber drivers got replaced with… literally empty space. Every profession (except maybe the construction trades, wink-wink, kids) has had its “wait, a machine does this now?” moment. It’s not that artists are wrong—they’re just waking up a few hours after the alarm went off.
And can we talk about irony? The people who invented de-aging, face replacement, CGI crowds, and posthumous cameos are now wincing at their own Pandora’s box. They taught the computer to replace extras so they could save on catering, and now they’re scandalized that the algorithm is coming for the close-up? What did they think was going to happen—stop at “youthful glow” and call it a day?
Remember that time Drew Barrymore beamed a holographic Cameron Diaz into her studio to appear on the show’s premiere episode? I guess that level of sorcery is acceptable. You know, since no jobs were harmed in the filming of the clip and all.
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Norwood naysayers are quick to say that no AI “actress” can walk, talk, or move like a real person. (Have they never seen Keanu Reeves in Speed?) I say this with love: the “but it’s not human” ship sailed about three streaming ages ago. Audiences have been suspending disbelief ever since long before we spotted the zipped-up alien suits on Star Trek. (“The dude in the dress is Juliet? Cool, got it.”) If the story lands, viewers will forgive a surprising lot—green screen skies, auto-tuned ballads, “historical epics” shot entirely in Burbank. People want dopamine and closure. They’ll take them in whatever container ships fastest.
“I may be AI, but I’m feeling very real emotions right now,” Tilly told her 46,000 Instagram followers. You can go ahead and cue up the laugh track: the industry that casts 34-year-olds as high school sophomores hates her because… she’s fake.
What do you think of artificial intelligence invading Hollywood? LMK in the quiz/comments!
"Hollywood is powered by fake boobs, fake tans, fake butts, fake hair, fake lips, fake nails, fake relationships, fake names, and fake accents…"
You forgot fake resumes & fake sexual preferences.
You GO though gurl.
Not only should they be banned, but AI data centers should be banned from connecting to the public utility power grid. Let them build their own private power stations (and the permitting that goes with finding a site for it) so they don’t affect our rates. Otherwise we ALL pay to subsidize the knife that slits our throat.