It’s not every day that a complete newcomer sets Hollywood abuzz, but Tilly Norwood is no ordinary starlet. With a growing social media following and talk of a major agency signing her, she seems to have it all.
There’s just one catch: Tilly Norwood isn’t a person. She’s a collection of code, and her popularity is causing a massive rift in the entertainment industry.
Reasons for exploring AI talent
Introduced over the summer by Dutch actor and producer Eline Van der Velden, Norwood is the first talent from Xicoia, a newly launched AI talent studio and spin-off of Van der Velden’s Particle6 Productions.
Tilly Norwood first appeared publicly in July in a comedy sketch titled AI Commissioner, produced by Particle6. On her Facebook page, Norwood wrote, “I may be AI generated, but I’m feeling very real emotions right now. I am so excited for what’s coming next!”
At last week’s Zurich Summit, an entertainment and tech industry event, Van der Velden told Deadline that interest in Norwood had grown rapidly.
“When we first launched Tilly, people were like, ‘What’s that?’, and now we’re going to be announcing which agency is going to be representing her in the next few months,” she said. Van der Velden has described her goal as making Tilly “the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman,” citing economic pressures and creative flexibility as reasons for exploring AI talent.
Norwood maintains social media profiles on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, where she appears as a photogenic, dark-haired woman in her twenties, living a seemingly normal life in London. Her accounts have attracted tens of thousands of followers in just a few months.
Push back from SAG-AFTRA and actors
Not everyone in Hollywood is welcoming the rise of synthetic performers.
SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union representing more than 160,000 performers, issued a statement opposing the replacement of human actors with AI.
“Creativity is, and should remain, human-centered. The union is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics,” SAG-AFTRA’s statement said.
SAG-AFTRA stressed that Norwood is “not an actor, it’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation. 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.
The union warned that using synthetic performers without complying with contractual obligations could put human actors’ livelihoods at risk, noting that studios must provide notice and negotiate with the union whenever AI performers are employed.
Some actors have voiced strong opposition to Norwood’s rise:
On “The View,” Whoopi Goldberg said, “You can always tell them from us. We move differently, our faces move differently, our bodies move differently.”
Melissa Barrera criticized agents considering signing Norwood on Instagram, writing, “Hope all actors repped by the agent that does this, drop their a$$. How gross, read the room.”
Mara Wilson questioned the ethics of using composite images of real people: “And what about the hundreds of living young women whose faces were composited together to make her? You couldn’t hire any of them?”
Emily Blunt called the idea “really, really scary,” while Eiza Gonzalez described it as “horrific and terrifying.”
Defense from the creator
Van der Velden defended Norwood as a “creative work — a piece of art” rather than a replacement for human actors.
She compared AI to other storytelling tools such as animation, puppetry, or CGI, saying, “Just as animation, puppetry, or CGI opened fresh possibilities without taking away from live acting, AI offers another way to imagine and build stories. I’m an actor myself, and nothing — certainly not an AI character — can take away the craft or joy of human performance.”
Van der Velden expressed hope that AI will eventually be accepted as part of “the wider artistic family,” adding that audiences are primarily interested in compelling stories, not whether a performer is human.
The uproar comes nearly two years after SAG-AFTRA strikes over AI protections rocked Hollywood. While AI technology is already widely used in visual effects, Norwood represents a step closer to synthetic actors taking roles traditionally filled by humans.
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