Hollywood has seen its share of strange debuts, but few have rattled the industry quite like Tilly Norwood, a synthetic “AI actor” created in the Netherlands. On Instagram, she looks like any other aspiring starlet—brown hair, casual headshots, comedy skits that trade on “girl next door vibes.”
Scroll a little further and she even posts in the first person: “I may be AI, but I’m feeling very real emotions right now. I am so excited for what’s coming next!”
It sounds harmless enough, but Hollywood’s heavyweights aren’t laughing. The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) quickly issued a statement reminding studios and agencies 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.”
The union added: “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.”
Actors echoed the outrage. Emily Blunt, speaking on a Variety podcast, called the creation terrifying: “That’s an AI? Good Lord, we’re screwed. That is really, really scary. Come on, agencies, don’t do that. Please stop. Please stop taking away our human connection.” Natasha Lyonne went further, warning that “any talent agency that engages in this should be boycotted by all guilds.”
And on The View, Whoopi Goldberg dismissed Norwood’s supposed promise altogether: “They move differently, our faces move differently, our bodies move differently.”
For Eline Van der Velden, the Dutch actor and comedian behind Norwood, this is all misplaced panic. She insists her creation is not meant to compete with humans: “Creating Tilly has been, for me, an act of imagination and craftmanship, not unlike drawing a character, writing a role or shaping a performance.”
Instead, she argues, AI actors should be judged as “part of their own genre.” She has even hinted that big studios are already experimenting quietly, promising “public announcements about high-profile projects” in the months ahead.
Still, the backlash isn’t hard to understand. The introduction of synthetic performers cuts directly against the deal actors fought for during the long Hollywood strikes of 2023, when AI was enemy number one.
SAG-AFTRA reminded studios that hiring Norwood or others like her could jeopardize those hard-won protections: “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.”
That’s the crux of the AI industry in film. Norwood may be marketed as playful, even novel, but she embodies Hollywood’s deepest fears: that technology trained on human work will come to replace the very people who created it.
For a business built on charisma, struggle and lived experience, the idea of an AI “star” seems less futuristic innovation than a provocation.