Two years after AI protections for both writers and actors ruled the Hollywood labor strikes, production studio Particle6 is introducing an AI-generated “actor” it hopes can rival real-life human movie stars like Oscar winner Natalie Portman and Oscar nominee/accidental AI symbol Scarlett Johansson.
Meet Tilly Norwood, an AI “actor” and British-accented brunette (who has even reenacted Sydney Sweeney’s controversial “great jeans” ad). She also has an Instagram page with more than 36,000 followers and a bio that reads: “You’ll either get it or pretend you don’t. I’m a creation. #aiart.” It was there that Norwood announced her “first ever role” in “AI Commissioner,” a comedy sketch from Particle6 that satirizes the future of TV development and can be seen below.
“I may be AI, but I’m feeling very real emotions right now,” Norwood wrote. “I am so excited for what’s coming next!” That appears to be legitimate Hollywood representation, according to Eline Van der Velden, the Dutch founder of Particle6, who confirmed the launch of Xicoia, “the world’s first artificial intelligence talent studio,” at the Zurich Film Festival’s industry summit last weekend.
Speaking to Deadline’s Diana Lodderhose on Saturday, Van der Velden said that agents had expressed interest in representing Norwood and that an announcement regarding which agency would be representing her would be made in the coming months.
That news sparked ire among the entertainment industry, which has long been grappling with the role of AI in Hollywood. “This is literally the mark of the end of the industry as we know it,” Oscar-nominated filmmaker Luca Guadagnino wrote on X. “Say goodbye to actors. No one should be supporting this.”
Other actors flooded the comments section of Deadline’s own Instagram post. “Shame on these people,” wrote former child actor turned author Mara Wilson on Instagram. “They have stolen the faces of hundreds of young women to make this AI ‘actress.’ They’re not creators. They’re identity thieves.” In a separate comment, Wilson added, “What about the hundreds of living young women whose faces were composited together to make her? You couldn’t hire any of them?”
Added Emmy-winning director Reed Morano, “An AI actor has no life experience and no amount of clever prompts can replicate the effect of true humanity and soul. Thank you for your hollow & empty gift to feed the greedy and for reminding us there’s no floor to how low desperate people will go for money and headlines. Studios don’t buy into this snake oil, you will lose your audience.”
Melissa Barrera, star of In the Heights and the Scream franchise, wrote: “Hope all actors repped by the agent that does this, drop their a$$. How gross, read the room.” Euphoria’s Lukas Gage made a joke at Norwood’s expense: “She was a nightmare to work with!!!!” the actor wrote. Meanwhile, Toni Collette posted a string of screaming emojis while Rent star Tracie Thoms wrote simply, “So, why did we strike again?”
In 2023, the threat of AI loomed large in negotiations between SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP, where issues concerning the de-aging of certain actors or illegally using their likeness, perhaps to even help generate a figure like Norwood, ruled. An eventual deal was struck, with guild members securing “unprecedented provisions for consent and compensation that will protect members from the threat of AI.”
Naturally, not all performers were satisfied with the outcome regarding AI onscreen. Justine Bateman posted a warning on X that her fellow actors are now facing “a very unpleasant era…The use of ‘digital doubles’ alone will reduce the number of available jobs, because bigger name actors will have the opportunity to double or triple-book themselves on multiple projects at once.”
In a statement to Vanity Fair, SAG-AFTRA said the union “believes creativity is, and should remain, human-centered. The union is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics.” It also made clear that should any signatory producers may not use “synthetic performers” without providing notice or bargaining per contractual obligations.
The statement continued: “To be clear, ‘Tilly 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. 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.”
Van der Velden addressed backlash to Norwood on her Instagram in a statement also posted on Norwood’s own Instagram page: “To those who have expressed anger over the creation of my AI character, Tilly Norwood, she is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work—a piece of art. Like many forms of art before her, she sparks conversation, and that in itself shows the power of creativity.
“I see AI not as a replacement for people, but as a new tool, a new paintbrush. 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 wrote that she also believes AI characters “should be judged as part of their own genre, on their own merits, rather than compared directly with human actors.” But that is in direct opposition to some of the earlier comments, in which Van der Velden positions Norwood to one day compete against actual human actors.
“We want Tilly to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman, that’s the aim of what we’re doing,” Van der Velden told Broadcast International over the weekend, an especially bold comparison given Johansson’s rocky history with the technology. Of course, she voiced Joaquin Phoenix’s AI girlfriend in the 2013 film, Her. Then last May, Johansson threatened legal action against OpenAI, releasing a statement claiming that one of the company’s chatbot voices sounded “eerily similar to mine” despite her prior refusals to work with the company. OpenAI disabled use of the chatbot, citing “questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT” on X. OpenAI founder Sam Altman has since denied that there is any connection between Johansson and the Sky voice. Earlier this year, Johansson spoke out against another viral AI effort featuring several other A-listers appearing to disavow Kanye West’s rhetoric about Jewish people. “We must call out the misuse of A.I., no matter its messaging,” she said, “or we risk losing a hold on reality.”
As AI slowly encroaches on every facet of media, from Olympics and election coverage to the next awards cycle, some actors have embraced what Reese Witherspoon has hailed as the “future of filmmaking.” Priyanka Chopra Jonas’s representatives recently used AI tools to analyze viewer sentiment around her performance. “It feels here what the beginning of Pixar must have felt like,” Natasha Lyonne recently told The Hollywood Reporter about her new AI entertainment start-up, Asteria. “Everyone is in the Imagineering phase—very blue-sky, very inspiring, all trying to crack the code.”
But one has to wonder how these actors might feel about one day working alongside or even being replaced by a figment of AI. A taste of the uncharted road ahead: in a LinkedIn post reported by Variety, Van der Velden commented, “Audiences? They care about the story—not whether the star has a pulse. Tilly is already attracting interest from talent agencies and fans. The age of synthetic actors isn’t ‘coming’—it’s here.”
Vanity Fair has reached out to Van der Velden, Johansson, Portman, and, yes, even Norwood for comment.