Is Tilly Norwood an actor? Hollywood wrestles with AI

For most of Hollywood’s history, the word “actor” has required little explanation. Actors search for emotional truth in imaginary lives. They collaborate with directors and scene partners, endure 4 a.m. call times and, if everything goes right, thank their agents while collecting awards.

Tilly Norwood has done none of those things. That’s because Tilly exists only as code and pixels.

Last week’s announcement that Tilly — the AI-generated character that debuted last year amid fierce backlash from actors and unions — would star in an upcoming feature called “Misaligned” sparked a debate not only about AI’s impact on Hollywood jobs but about something even more basic: What, exactly, is Tilly? Some objected to referring to the digital character as “she” or “her.” Others rejected the idea that Tilly could be described as an actor at all.

The debate quickly spilled into 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, “How is this not just an animated film?” A third objected: “She is NOT an AI Actor, she is an AI Software Program.” But not everyone recoiled. “I’ll buy a ticket,” one reader wrote. “She’s very pretty.”

Taken together, the reactions exposed just how unsettled the language around AI has become. Nobody has ever confused Woody from “Toy Story” with Tom Hanks or Elsa from “Frozen” with Idina Menzel, or suggested the characters themselves deserved acting awards. The Tilly concept is testing whether those assumptions still hold. 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 performance come from?

Speaking by video call Thursday from the London headquarters of Particle6 — the AI entertainment startup that invented Tilly — Eline van der Velden, who got her start as an actor before moving into filmmaking and AI, says she understands why many actors reacted so strongly.

“I totally understand the fear,” she says. “I had the same fear when AI first came out. I didn’t invent the technology. I didn’t wish it was here. But it is. My way of dealing with it is to get on board.”

Set in a surreal digital world its creators call the “Tillyverse” and described as a coming-of-age dramedy, the planned feature follows Tilly, an AI entity with no lived experience of its own that gradually develops desires, ambitions and even shame as it becomes increasingly human.

Van der Velden compares Tilly to a character like Cinderella. Just as audiences naturally refer to the Disney princess as “she,” she argues it feels natural to think of Tilly the same way. She doesn’t consider the pronouns important.

“People can call her whatever they want,” she says with a shrug. “I take no offense to them calling her an ‘it.’”

The label she cares more about is actor. Van der Velden envisions 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 actor was because I don’t want to be limited to one character,” she says. “I’ve just created my own little Barbie doll and I want to play around with her.”

Van der Velden says creating a Tilly performance is a collaborative process that combines acting, AI prompting and traditional filmmaking. Van der Velden and other actors help develop the character’s backstory, voice and emotional life and, in some cases, contribute 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 serve the story.

“That’s where the critical human eye comes in,” Van der Velden says. “The choice-making is important. That’s the creativity right there.”

Eline van der Velden, creator of the AI Tilly Norwood, is a former actor turned filmmaker and tech strategist.

(Particle6)

Even its creators don’t always know what Tilly will do next. Van der Velden says that reviewing different AI-generated versions of a scene can sometimes feel like discovering an unexpectedly inspired take from a human actor. “I’m going to give you a blooper reel one day,” she says, laughing. “Honestly, she does the wackiest s—.”

Van der Velden disputes the idea that Tilly is meant to replace actors. “I’m not interested in Tilly taking a role that could be played by a real actor in a real film,” she says. Rather, the project has actually created new jobs, including for actors.

“We’ve sextupled our workforce,” she says of Particle6, which now has more than 30 employees. Van der Velden says the company is also collaborating with Hollywood directors and producers who have asked not to be identified publicly, fearing backlash. “We’ve created jobs for filmmakers, including actors who are amazing at developing character and backstory — how this person would think, how they would say a line,” she says. “Those skills still come into play. That’s the biggest misconception.”

Critics, including the leadership of SAG-AFTRA, counter that the displacement is already at hand in subtler ways, with background roles and commercials increasingly filled by digital doubles rather than human performers. For the actors union, the objection runs deeper than any single role or AI-generated advertisement. It’s about what counts as a performance at all.

“Let’s be clear: Tilly Norwood is not a person,” SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin and National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland co-wrote in an October message to members. “It’s a synthetic construct generated by software.” They argued that such systems are built on the work of countless professional performers without their permission, credit or compensation, and that audiences ultimately connect not with algorithms but with artists because “performance has always been a mirror of our shared humanity.”

Actor Justine Bateman takes an even harder line. Best known for playing Mallory Keaton on “Family Ties,” Bateman later became a filmmaker, earned a computer science degree from UCLA and founded CREDO 23, a film festival dedicated to showcasing and certifying movies made without AI.

To Bateman, no amount of convincing mimicry changes the fact that an AI figure has never actually experienced the emotions it’s portraying.

Actor and filmmaker Justine Bateman, a staunch opponent of AI adoption in Hollywood, believes any human role should be played by a human actor.

(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

“It should be absolutely nonnegotiable — if you have a character in your film that is a human, that must 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 the former executive editor of the Hollywood Reporter, sees Tilly occupying an uncomfortable middle ground. He likens Tilly to Pixar’s computer-animated characters — another technological leap that initially met resistance before becoming accepted as a legitimate form of screen performance.

“Yes, it’s a kind of performance,” Galloway says. “Tilly isn’t an actor and yet it is a performance. It’s a strange paradox.”

Still, he sees a crucial distinction.

“We go into a movie with the desire to believe,” he says. “We go in willing to see the same person in different settings — Brad Pitt or any movie star — because they allow us to pretend they’re somebody else and identify with them. When it’s an entirely computerized creation, you’re coming in with the odds completely stacked against that. You’re never going to believe Tilly Norwood is a real person in a real situation that we can identify with and care about. The reality remains too fake to accept.”

Galloway says he got a glimpse of that resistance this spring when Chapman University hosted a symposium examining AI’s impact on entertainment. After promotional materials announced that Tilly would be appearing, he says, the school was inundated with emails from people who mistakenly assumed the AI character was being presented as the equivalent of a celebrity master class.

“We’d had master classes with the Rock and Ariana Grande,” he recalls. “Suddenly there was this wildfire: ‘How dare you do a master class with Tilly Norwood?’ People were more upset about Tilly than about all sorts of things going on in Washington.”

Whatever happens to Tilly, it is unlikely to be the last AI-generated character audiences encounter. AI-generated influencers, virtual personalities and digital performers are already proliferating online, while entertainment companies continue to experiment with AI-created characters.

Bateman worries audiences may eventually stop caring whether a performance comes from a human being or AI. “If you’ve only fed them junk food and then you put some beautiful Michelin-star food in front of them, it’ll seem alien to them,” she says.

To Bateman, the difference isn’t merely aesthetic; it’s human.

“AI has gotten better at all the quirky human behavior — the little head tilts and hesitations and body language,” she says. “But when you hear somebody singing live who has that gift, who has that instrument in their throat, it’s remarkable. It hits the human soul.”