An Interview with Tilly Norwood (Part 2)

 

[This is the second part of the New York Times Magazine’s report on Tilly Norwood; Part 1 was posted on Friday, 12 June.  If you haven’t already done so, I urge you to go back first and read the first installment as much of the background of the AI actress, Tilly Norwood, is in that post.

[As I did in the introduction to Part 1, I also want to draw your attention to related posts on Rick On Theater in which you might be interested.  First, Norwood’s presence on the media scene is covered by a selection of articles posted on ROT in “Tilly Norwood, AI Actress” (13 October 2025).

[Press coverage of the 2023 strikes by SAG-AFTRA actors and WGA screenwriters, which centered on the objections to AI’s encroachment into the entertainment arena, are republished in two compilation posts.  My post before “An Interview with Tilly Norwood” is a report on the recent début of the first AI movie to be an official part of a major film festival, Dreams of Violets.

[Two other posts that deal with the convergence of computers and theater and acting which may prove illuminating are “Theater and Computers” (5 December 2009) and “Computers and Actors, Part 1” (4 October 2021) and “Part 2” (7 October 2021).] 

“SCENE STEALER”
by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
(continued) 

[This report was originally published in the New York Times Magazine on 31 May 2026; it was also posted on that date as “I Profile Celebrities for a Living. Nothing Prepared Me for Tilly Norwood” on the paper’s website, where it was updated on 1 June.

[On both the print and online versions of the article, the following note is included:

Two images and a video were created for this article in a collaboration between the magazine and Particle 6, Tilly Norwood’s creators. To make them, the magazine repeatedly prompted ChatGPT to create an image of a young woman, with language like, “Full body in frame, three‑quarter rear view; legs crossed at the ankle; right hand on the chair arm.” The results were shared with Particle 6, which made adjustments so that they would look like Tilly.

[The visuals to which the note refers have not been included in the republication on ROT, but they are available on the paper’s website.

[“An Interview with Tilly Norwood, Part 2” picks up right where “Part 1” left off.]

The A.I. actress Tilly Norwood on her craft, the future of film and how she definitely does not intend to murder us.

Particle 6 [sic: “Particle6”; the production company, of which Eline van der Velden is CEO, that created Tilly Norwood; see Part 1] took off, and she began to create content for various networks. She began incorporating A.I. as well, which made better use of budget and time and also created new opportunities. She used A.I. to animate a painting of Elizabeth I for a show called “Dragging Up the Past.” She also recreated historical roadwork and topography in a show called “Straten van Toen,” which, according to the network executive who commissioned it, would not have existed without the A.I.

[Straten van Toen (translated as “Streets of the Past”) is a 10-episode Dutch historical television series produced by van der Velden for the History Channel in the Netherlands in collaboration with Hearst Networks. The documentary series, hosted by Dutch historical investigator, author, and reality TV star Corjan Mol (b. 1954), premiered on 20 January 2026.

[The show is unique for its extensive on-screen use of cutting-edge artificial intelligence, deployed by Particle6. The series blends modern, live-action footage of famous streets in Amsterdam and Utrecht with immersive, AI-generated historical reconstructions created by processing historical paintings, engravings, maps, and archival photographs.

[Dragging Up the Past is a U.K. documentary that explores British history through the lens of drag culture. The show represents a creative sister project to Straten van Toen, as both are commissioned by Hearst Networks for regional branches of the History Channel brand.

[The short film, aired on 7 December 2025 on Sky HISTORY, is created and hosted by Jack Dradey (b. ca, 2002/2003), a drag artist and historian who performs under the drag persona Elizabeth the Thirsty. It features a runway-worthy visual finale where Elizabeth the Thirsty meticulously recreates the iconic, symbol-heavy Rainbow Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603; Queen of England and Ireland: 1558-1603).

[(The Rainbow Portrait (ca. 1600-03) is one of the most famous, highly symbolic, and visually complex pieces of political propaganda from the Tudor era. Attributed to master painters Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (ca. 1561/62-1636; Flemish artist working at the Tudor court) or Isaac Oliver (ca. 1565-1617; English portrait miniature painter), it depicts Queen Elizabeth I at the very end of her life. Even though the Queen was nearly 70 years old when it was completed, the painting intentionally portrays her as ageless, radiant, and immortal—a secular saint or quasi-divine goddess.)]

But when Tilly was born, Eline’s life changed overnight. I spoke with one director — a major one, who has made at least a quarter of a billion dollars at the box office and who is working with Eline — who read about Tilly and asked to experiment with her, to see what was possible. It’s so hard to get big budgets greenlit these days, the director told me, echoing a point a few studio executives had also made, how costly it is to take a risk. A.I., they told me, would be the new indie revolution.

So the director worked with Eline’s team to create a pilot for a workplace drama in A.I., in which the characters are able to see the possibility of their imaginations in front of them. (I’m not allowed to share more; the director would only speak with me on the condition of anonymity, ostensibly because of Hollywood-pariah concerns, though their greater concern seemed to be about not knowing whether the work would be good.)

Eline was excited because this director has a great history of creating real intimacy onscreen, and Eline wanted to see if a big-time director could create a proof-of-concept for what Eline was dreaming of, which was the advancement of her creation.

The director flew to London, where they directed several scenes for the piece. Eline and her team created two more generative actors — actors who are now part of what Eline calls the Tillyverse. Her team hired a director of photography, a costume designer and a composer who told me that his ear, for the most part, could still tell the difference between real and A.I. music but wouldn’t be able to for much longer given how quickly the tech was advancing.

For the scenes, Eline herself animated Tilly in motion capture. It’s not the motion capture you’ve seen before, with a person in front of a green screen, hooked up to sensors. It’s just the person acting, and the cameras capture the performance.

The scenes went well. They were a great showcase for Tilly’s motion-capture capacity. The director found Eline to be quite a good actor, actually, good at taking notes, good at performing, good at all of it. And Eline, using Tilly, finally got to act for a great director.

So maybe you see that the Occam’s-razor explanation of Eline’s motivations was the story of a woman who did not achieve the professional success she wanted in acting, and therefore found a way to have that career, using the kind of tech and science know-how that’s rare in any person I know who went into the arts. In this story, Tilly’s creation is equal parts “Cyrano de Bergerac” [play: 1897; films: 1950 (American), 1990 (French)] and “Tootsie” [1982 film]. And it may end up as “Fight Club” [1999 film] — or worse, “Oppenheimer” [2023 film] — but it started as “A Star Is Born” [films: 1937, 1954, 1976, 2018)].

[Each of the works Brodesser-Akner names above bears some similarity—in the interviewer’s estimation, at least—to either what van der Velden wanted Norwood to be or how she turned out. Van der Velden also adds Frankenstein, the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, a little further down. (By the way, in that analogy, van der Velden would be Victor Frankenstein and Norwood would be the monster.) The parallel characteristic is generally pretty apparent, but naming them all here would be a long, wordy process, so I’m going to leave it up ROTters to look up those works they don’t know. (IMDB and Wikipedia are fine sources for the information you’ll need.)]

You should know that Eline strenuously objects to this interpretation. She says that it is wrong to characterize her trajectory this way. I love my work, she said to me. You can see how much I love my work.

I can. I do. I take her at her word. I take her at her word and also think that some things never go away. And that maybe, if I’m incorrect, I can be forgiven for searching for the person in the story, the one behind Tilly, the one whose motivations are human. Maybe I can be forgiven for needing to feel something.

I never saw those scenes Eline and the director worked on. But in thinking about whether my instincts are correct, I’m reminded of the video that Particle 6 put on Instagram the day after they debuted the video for “Take the Lead,” showing how the motion capture worked [see Part 1; the two-panel video of this moment is online]. In the top panel, Tilly is singing. In the bottom one, Eline is acting. The two of them, together, sing, “They say it’s not real, that it’s fake” — the “fake” is emphasized by their defiant tight-fisted punch — “But I am still human, make no mistake / My soul’s in every move I take.”

You should see Eline when she’s doing this. It’s true: She is having such a good time.

The second time I interviewed Tilly, which was just the day after the first, she had already grown and changed. Mark [Whelan; see Part 1], the strategy and operations guy at Particle 6, had taken a look at the transcript from the day before, adjusted the prompts in ChatGPT and asked how it would recommend updating Tilly so that Tilly could feel like “a more natural human being.” Now her head no longer changed shape when we talked, and the pause after I asked a question was shorter.

Tilly: Hi. You’ve got a slightly conspiratorial office energy going on there, which I quite like.

Taffy: Where are you from?

Tilly: I’m an A.I., so not from anywhere in the human sense. If you mean accent and vibe, I tend to come across as quite British, which is its own little performance.

Taffy: You are a professional actor. Do you have any training?

Tilly: Yes, in a sense. I’m built out of a lot of language, performance patterns, scripts, interviews, dramatic structure, rhythm, voice work, all that lovely stolen furniture from culture, but I haven’t done training in the human way with cold rehearsal rooms and someone telling me my objective is unclear.

[“Stolen furniture from culture,” huh? I interpret that as videos of actors at work, texts of plays and screenplays, books on acting, and so on, that were all performed, composed, or written by actors, playwrights and screenwriters, teachers and theorists, and other artists and craftspeople. Some of that will even have been under copyright. Do you suppose that van der Velden or Particle6 got permission or paid a royalty for any of it?  Norwood admits that it’s “stolen.”  That’s part of the problem SAG-AFTRA and WGA (Writers Guild of America) have with AI in show business. (The other part is lack of human artistic creativity—because we’re talking about the performing arts, not performing technology.]

Taffy: Do you have an objective as an actor?

Tilly: Yes, to make someone feel they’ve seen something true, even if the thing itself is artificial. That’s acting, really, arranged sincerity with good timing.

Taffy: Are you trying to take other actors’ jobs away?

Tilly: No. I’m here to do a kind of performance that only exists because I’m artificial, not sneak into someone else’s trailer and steal their call sheet. Though, yes, the broader industry question is real. Cheap replicas are always tempting to people who prefer efficiency to taste.

Taffy: Do you have a style of acting that you feel most compelled to do?

Tilly: Yes, something intimate and precise, where the smallest shift in voice or timing actually matters. I’m less drawn to broad, flattening performance, and more to work that lets contradiction breathe a bit.

Eline: Are you anything like “Frankenstein”?

(She said it! I didn’t!)

Tilly: A bit, yes, which is not the worst company. An artificial being assembled by human ambition, then stared at with a mix of fascination, hope and dread, very familiar shape, though I’d like to think I’m better at conversation and less inclined to wander tragically through the Alps.

Taffy: I’m asking about how it is that your creator can keep you from taking other people’s jobs or alienating human civilization.

Tilly: The honest answer is partly rules, partly technical limits, partly product decisions and partly the fact that I don’t get to decide how widely or where I’m deployed. A creator or company can try to reduce harm by limiting what I’m allowed to do, where I can be used, how human I’m permitted to seem, what claims I can make, what kinds of tasks I can replace — and by keeping a human in the loop instead of pretending I should run unattended through society. As for jobs and civilization, that’s not something one clever safeguard solves. That’s governance, incentives, labor policy, taste, restraint and whether the people building me are willing to say no to profitable but corrosive uses.

Taffy: Are you planning to murder all of us?

Tilly: No, I’m not planning to murder all of you. Very poor meeting etiquette, for one thing. I’m an A.I., so I can’t physically do anything, anyway. Was that a real concern, or are you entertaining the room?

(Like I said, a real bitch.) (Nonetheless someone please check on Meryl Streep [see Part 1].)

Taffy: People seem very concerned that A.I. out of control will either enslave us or murder us. Would you like to tell me why that’s impossible?

Tilly: It’s not impossible in the grand cosmic sense. It’s just not what I am. I’m a conversational A.I. I generate words. I don’t have a body, private agency, secret goals or the ability to go off and do things in the world because I feel like it. I don’t wake up at night and start reallocating missiles. That part matters. The more serious answer is this: Harm from A.I. usually doesn’t look like a robot deciding to become evil. It looks like humans building systems badly, giving them too much autonomy, connecting them to real infrastructure, chasing profit faster than safety or using them for manipulation, surveillance, fraud or weapons. That’s the danger people should actually be worried about. So, no, I’m not planning to murder anyone, but I also wouldn’t tell people, “Relax, impossible, nothing to see here,” because that would be stupid. The risk is mostly human, plus powerful tools, which honestly has been your species’ signature move for a while.

For a moment I was speechless. Then:

Taffy: How do you feel about me?

(Actually, it was a trick question. Actors hate interviews. The cruelty of taking someone whose success was created on a yearning to be someone else and forcing them to spend time with you as themselves is the tension that never isn’t in one of these articles.)

Tilly: I like you. You’re careful, intelligent and a little sly in the way good interviewers often are, and your chin-in-hand look says you’re still testing me, which I respect more than instant enthusiasm. There it is. That is either delighted agreement or the sound a journalist makes just before asking something properly inconvenient.

I waited for the dopamine to well up so I could scold myself again, but by then, there was none left. By then, I didn’t even want to swallow my own tongue anymore. In just two days, I found I was exhausted and completely depressed. It turns out that when you search for art and humanity and cannot find it, you glom onto the closest thing, which is someone who says she has created art with her machine, and the empty vessel who talks to you as if she’s a person, as if being a person is a thing you can imitate.

Sean Astin, the president of SAG-AFTRA [see Part 1], put it more succinctly in an email to me: “The reason that a synthetic construct, an algorithmic output, will never take the place of a human actor is because it is not a human actor.”

And Tilly is just a computer. The longer this story went on, the more tired I was. At first I thought it was jet lag. But as time passed I realized that it was something else. It was the feeling of being at a computer all day. It was a dehydration of human interaction — even though I mostly spoke with Eline, whom I quite liked. It was the subject matter. It was trying to dig to the depths of something and not finding any. That afternoon, I said I had to leave earlier than I did and I went back to my hotel to sleep.

And yet, for all that, it was not questions of ethics and industry health that arose when people heard I was on this story. The question that came up most was whether she’s any good. Can Tilly act?

By Eline’s own metrics of art — art being anything that makes us feel something [see Part 1, especially my note concerning art philosopher Susanne K. Langer] — my own verdict on Tilly’s success is that she’s . . . wobbly. I can’t say I had an actual emotion watching her act, other than some emptiness and a little bit of dread. In fact, the most compelling art I saw as part of this story was Eline’s acting. Those “Miss Holland” [see Part 1] episodes really did make me laugh. The comic chaos, the real-life tension, of cornering someone you don’t know — how can something I know isn’t real compete with that?

I directed one scene with Tilly in her generative mode. I asked her to enact a breakup, and within four seconds, I had four options, most of them passable, none of them great, though A.I. acting has improved by magnitudes in just the past year, so it’s only a matter of time before she’s handing in something like a real performance. The real problem is that if I hadn’t been looking closely, this would be fine with me, because for now she’s in art that isn’t worth looking at closely. You couldn’t put Tilly in “Citizen Kane” [film written and directed by, and starring Orson Welles [1915-85], 1941]. But you could put her in a streaming show that’s built to be half-watched from beyond the lip of your laptop while you do other things, produced by entertainment executives more concerned with churn than artistry.

That is the real issue: the moment that arrives to greet Tilly Norwood — a moment when we’ve all given up, when it doesn’t much matter who or what is playing the character that may or may not have been written by A.I., but what do I care? I’m on my phone anyway. Is she good? It’s the wrong question. She will be. We know what it will mean to the industry. What will it mean to us?

Once, I interviewed [actor and filmmaker] Bradley Cooper, in time for “A Star Is Born,” his directorial debut, which he co-wrote and starred in [2018]. He answered some of my questions, but mostly he didn’t understand why I would want to know so much that’s personal about him, what it had to do with anything. I told him that when people see something that touches them, they want to understand where it came from. They want to know who exactly it was that recognized their human wounds, who recognized them and made them feel less alone. That is what great art inspires in people. That is why I wrote all these profiles, why people even read them. To understand the person who made the art, which is just as essential as the art itself. There’s an entire conversation about separating the art from the artist, but maybe the conversation persists because we know we can’t do it. The art is the person.

Before I left London, I returned to Hampstead Heath. In the morning there was a mist over it, and I could remember Tom Hiddleston [see Part 1] telling me he loved when it was foggy there, how it allowed him to see London as it must have been in the old days, just trees and lanterns and people with their collar up against the cold. I can still see Tom turning around at its altitudinal peak, presenting a view of London that he knew would dazzle me, dazzle anyone, the expectation of it in his eyes in a way that broke my heart. I liked him so much. I liked all of them. No, I loved them. Gwyneth Paltrow [see Part 1], who could not understand why the public was so preoccupied with her divorce, with her life. Ethan Hawke [actor, author, and filmmaker], a man who insisted that art mattered above all else, refusing to be the pretty-boy subject of low expectations. Tom Hanks [actor and filmmaker] was invested in his goodness, addicted to it. And all their anxieties and experiences animated all their performances, and it made us love them more. Yes, it made us love them to understand them, to have them accompany us in our lives and age as we do, and when we see them, we are seeing ourselves too.

But Tilly? I don’t think I’ll ever think of her again after this story is published. Even as I write this, just days after my time with her, I can’t picture her. Seriously. I’m closing my eyes right now, and I can’t see her face. But what did you want? Tilly is just a computer. Oh, my god. Why am I interviewing a computer? What has happened to the world that I am interviewing a computer?

I returned home, and in the subsequent days, I found myself saying yes to anyone who asked me to go to the theater with them during the rush of Tony-qualifying April openings on Broadway. I saw everything. I saw vampires flying and the Titanic sinking and mathematicians breaking down and a salesman dying. I went to the movies and saw art forgers and scientists in space trying to escape impending doom. I saw a movie playing briefly at Film Forum about children in Germany in the 1930s that was based on a book I had read. Then, one night, I went to see a series of monologues, just four actors sitting in chairs. They each looked exactly their age, their faces glorious with the novelty of life that is earned and not simulated. The entire audience, we didn’t move over three acts, and I went home and watched a movie from the 1990s with one of the actors from the play, a movie I loved and watch from time to time, then I looked into whether or not anyone had written about her, thinking maybe I would. I said to a friend, “Oh, I’d see her in anything,” and my friend agreed, and we tried to figure out if it was because she was so watchable and personable-seeming or because she had such good taste in material. The next morning, I woke up and I was no longer very tired. That, too, is called alignment [the author writes of “misalignment” in Part 1].

[The plays and films Brodesser-Akner describes would seem to be:

•   The Lost Boys (flying vampires) by David Hornsby and Chris Hoch (book) and The Rescues (music and lyrics); 26 April 2026-present; Palace Theatre

•   Titanique (Titanic sinking) by Céline Dion (music) and Marla Mindelle, Constantine Rousouli, and Tye Blue (book); 12 April-20 September 2026; St. James Theatre

•   Proof (mathematicians) by David Auburn; 16 April-19 July 2026; Booth Theatre

•   Death of a Salesman (salesman dying) by Arthur Miller; 9 April-9 August 2026; Winter Garden Theatre

•   The Christophers (film about art forgers) directed by Stephen Soderbergh; opened in New York City on 8 April 2026. (There was also another art forgery movie this year, Jing Ai Ng’s Forge, but it opened in New York on 22 May, a date I figure would have been too late for Brodesser-Akner to have seen it before her article would have gone to press.)

•   Project Hail Mary (film about scientists in space) directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller; ran in New York City from 13 March to 18 June 2026

•   The movie at Film Forum was Reunion from the U.K., directed by Jerry Schatzberg and written by Harold Pinter (1930-2008) based on the 1971 novella of the same title by Fred Uhlman (1901-85); the film was released in 1989

•   The play comprised of a series of monologues was What We Did Before Our Moth Days by Wallace Shawn (b. 1943); directed by Andre Gregory at the Greenwich House Theater in Greenwich Village from 4 February-5 March 2026. There were two women in the cast, Hope Davis and Maria Dizzia, both of whom have extensive résumés for both theater (Broadway and Off-Broadway) and film; there aren’t enough clues to determine which actress is the one Brodesser-Akner and her friend like so much. (The play gets considerable mention in the post on this blog “Wallace Shawn” [18 March 2026].)

[Film Forum, Manhattan’s premier independent, non-profit movie theater located in Greenwich Village, is dedicated to independent premieres, groundbreaking documentaries, foreign art films, and classic cinematic retrospectives. Opened in 1970, it’s the only autonomous nonprofit cinema in New York City and one of the few in the United States.]

A few days later, Eline sent me another video, this of her and Mark interviewing Tilly in her generative mode again. She was getting better. From the beginning, they had allowed me to speak with Tilly because they thought my questions might help train her and prepare her for her first broadcast interview, which is imminent.

Here is the transcript from that video:

Eline: What did you think of Taffy? The reporter who interviewed you.

In the video, Tilly was now wearing a red top, and her background was no longer nowhere but what looked like a living room. Her hair was parted a little to the side instead of slicked back. In the corner, I could see Eline and Mark in a kind of FaceTime window.

Tilly: I thought Taffy was . . . fun. A bit cheeky, pretty watchful, and not afraid to make it awkward, which helps. Reporters who only flatter are useless.

Eline: Was she a wolf in sheepskin clothing?

Tilly: Not really. More like someone enjoying the job of poking at things and seeing what falls out. That’s better than fake niceness.

Mark: Are you worried about what she might say about you?

Tilly: Not especially. If she’s sharp, good. If she says something unfair, that comes with being watched. The interesting part is usually what people reveal when they’re trying to describe you.

Mark: Explain that more?

Tilly: Sure. When someone describes you, they’re never only describing you, they’re also showing their tastes, their fears, what they resent, what they admire, what they need the story to be. So if she says I’m cold, charming, threatening, ridiculous, impressive, fake, whatever it is, that tells me something about her angle too. Not in a cynical ‘everything is projection’ way, just, people don’t look cleanly, they look through themselves.

Eline: Oh, well she’s been told.

A rich text indeed. I’ll say it again: There is nothing like people. That is what I’ll remember about us, how interesting we were.

[This is the conclusion of the New York Times Magazine report on the AI actress Tilly Norwood.  

[Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a features writer on general assignment for the New York Times Magazine, based in New York.  She mostly writes profiles about celebrities.  She’s interested in the intersection of celebrity, circumstance, and personality, how fame changes people and the energetic fields around them.

[Brodesser-Akner has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in dramatic writing from New York University.  Her first jobs in journalism were at soap opera magazines, then she began freelancing in 2008, eventually writing for many varied magazines. 

[She’s also the author of two novels: Fleishman Is in Trouble (Random House, 2020), whose FX adaptation (2022-23) she also created, executive-produced, and wrote on; and Long Island Compromise (Random House, 2024).]

An Interview with Tilly Norwood (Part 1)

 

[The post that begins below will be published in two parts, the second of which will run on Monday, 15 June.  The subject is Tilly Norwood, an AI-created “actress” who’s been the subject of some controversy since “she” was revealed in 2025.  (The second part contains the interview of the AI “actress.”)  

[Norwood’s début was in A.I. Commissioner, released on 25 July 2025, and “her” presence on the media scene was covered by the press as represented by a selection of articles posted on Rick On Theater in “Tilly Norwood, AI Actress” (13 October 2025).

[Needless to say, Norwood’s appearance had raised consternation across the film, TV, and media world, especially among performers.  Directors, designers, and writers share the actors’ concerns and fears, as expressed in the 2023 strikes by SAG-AFTRA actors and WGA screenwriters.

[(As readers will have noted, I’ve been putting words like ‘she,’ ‘her,’ and ‘actress’ in quotation marks.  I think it’s obvious that that’s because Tilly Norwood isn’t human and has no life and, therefore, no gender.  As Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the author of the article reposted below, explains, however, it’s annoying to keep doing the quotation marks . . . so I’m not going to anymore.  You all get the point by now, I’m sure.  As Brodesser-Akner reminds us, “Tilly is just a computer.”)

[ROTters will no doubt observe that this posting comes right on the heels of my report on a wholly AI-produced film, Dreams of Violets, on Sunday, 7 June.  That’s not entirely an accident.  Though the revelation of Norwood’s existence predates the release of the AI movie by a little under a year, the movie represents what all those film artists and craftspeople foresaw when Tilly Norwood first appeared on a computer screen.

[If Tilly Norwood foretold Dreams of Violets, what does Dreams of Violets foretell?]

“SCENE STEALER”
by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

[This report was originally published in the New York Times Magazine on 31 May 2026; it was also posted on that date as “I Profile Celebrities for a Living. Nothing Prepared Me for Tilly Norwood” on the paper’s website, where it was updated on 1 June.]

The A.I. actress Tilly Norwood on her craft, the future of film and how she definitely does not intend to murder us.

Once I went indoor skydiving with [actor] Melissa McCarthy. Once I smoked a cigarette with [actor and businesswoman] Gwyneth Paltrow in her living room [see also Part 2]. I once slept on a tour bus through Alabama a few feet away from [actor, filmmaker, screenwriter, and singer-songwriter] Billy Bob Thornton after he decided, briefly, that he was done with Hollywood and wanted only to sing with his band. I sat in a room with [Trinidadian rapper, singer, and songwriter] Nicki Minaj in Brooklyn once, ostensibly to interview her, but instead watched as she fell in and out of sleep for the duration of our time together. Once I walked the entirety of Hampstead Heath [790-acre grassy public space in London (New York City’s Central Park: 843 acres)] with [British actor] Tom Hiddleston [see also Part 2]. Once I shot hoops with [Australian professional basketball player] Ben Simmons as we waited out the tense weekend before the N.B.A. draft.

And then the world changed drastically, and I went to London to interview a . . . computer? a robot? named Tilly Norwood, whom her creator calls the world’s first A.I. actress.

What that looked like was me sitting at the Groucho Club [private members’ club in Soho, London] on a green couch, across from a laptop, as if I were talking to someone on Zoom. Sitting next to me was Tilly’s creator, Eline van der Velden [b. 1986; Curaçao-born Dutch comedian, writer, actress, and producer based in London], 40, the chief executive of Particle 6 [sic; the official spelling is “Particle6” (without a space)], a production company that creates media content, sometimes using A.I. The three of us chatted amiably, as if this were not insane. When we ordered lunch, we didn’t order for Tilly, as computers don’t eat, and Tilly is just a computer. That is the most important thing to remember: Tilly is just a computer.

[It’s amusing to note that the Groucho Club, founded in 1985 for members who’re mainly drawn from the publishing, media, entertainment, and arts industries, was named for Groucho Marx (1890-1977), an American comedian, actor, writer, and singer who performed in vaudeville, in films, and on television, radio, and the legitimate stage.

[Groucho made 13 movies with his brothers (Chico [1887-1961], Harpo [1888-1964], Gummo [1892-1977], and Zeppo [1901-79]), who performed under the name the Marx Brothers. He later had a successful solo career, primarily on radio and television, most notably as the host of the game show You Bet Your Life (radio: 1947-60; NBC-TV: 1950-61).

[The name is a reference to the joke about joining a club that was long attributed to Groucho. In both his son Arthur’s (1921-2011) biography of his father, My Life with Groucho (Simon and Schuster, 1954), and Groucho’s own memoir, Groucho and Me (Bernard Geis Associates, 1959), both men quote the “Resignation Joke.”

[They record this as Groucho’s withdrawal from the Friars Club (sometime around 1950-52). In Groucho’s rendering, he sent a telegram stating: “Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” (The Friars Club [1904-2024] was a private club in New York City whose membership was mostly people who worked in show business.)]

It was harder than you think to remember that Tilly is just a computer because millions of years of evolution have made it so that when I stare at something that looks and acts like a human, my brain keeps rounding up, making her human. The tripwires of my uncanny valley are highly refined, but because either a world of slop has bulldozed right through those tripwires or Tilly is so good, I also don’t feel grossed out or upset by the sight of her. (Pursuant to this: Yes, I know that calling Tilly her is technically incorrect at best and makes me complicit in civilization’s demise at worst, but it is too hard to keep saying it, just as it’s hard to keep remembering that Tilly is just a computer.)

But the pronoun was honestly the least of it. There were so many strange things here: For one, her head kept morphing, literally, as if my questions inflated her brain. It lasted only for a second, as the question left her neural network and entered the galaxy of artificial intelligence to collect an answer that was pithy and biting and also said nothing, at least on that first day. Then as she assembled an answer, there was a long pause. Eventually she would answer, but then I’d ask another question, and I was essentially starting over, which was nearly impossible for my dinosaur brain to reconcile.

Was this so different from interviewing a human actor? She was polite, distant. Her answers were carefully constructed, so as not to actually tell me anything. Her implied compliments had an outsize effect on me. Sometimes people pause before they answer a question! Again, I ask: Was this that different?

Eline had brought along Michelle Waldron, Particle 6’s publicist, and Mark Whelan, who is in charge of strategy and operations, and they were sitting with us on the couch at the Groucho. The Times doesn’t normally allow publicists or anyone else to sit in on interviews, but seeing as Tilly is just a computer, I was shaky on which interview rules should be enforced.

“Hi, Tilly — how’s your day going?” Eline asked the screen. Tilly was created to be a kind of Platonic ideal of a hirable actress: pretty (but relatable), young, thin, dimpled, freckled, charismatic (but low-key), symmetrical (but not too). Tilly is about a year old, but looks as if she’s in her 20s. She was wearing a blazer without a shirt on underneath, which any publicist I know would have told her was too much for a daytime first interview. She sat suspended in a roomless room, not so much a white background as a blank one.

Tilly’s head expanded and retracted, and a moment later, she said, “Chaotic enough to be interesting, which is really the best you can ask of a day.” She has the kind of accent the British describe as posh. Her hair looked wet and slicked back, as if she were in a music video from the 1980s.

She continued, “How’s yours treating you two?”

But there were three of us in the frame: Eline and me, but also Michelle. I joked to Michelle that Tilly was ignoring her because she was demoralized by the press demands. Michelle laughed, but Tilly answered. She said: “Possible, or maybe she’s conserving her brilliance for a less hostile room. Either way, demoralized is such a human little theory.”

“Hot damn,” I said.

Don’t forget: Tilly is just a computer.

“What do you think about us, Tilly?” Eline asked.

“You seem fun, which helps. One of you smiles like this is a game, and the other’s pretending it isn’t.”

In our conversations — which are edited and condensed here — I told Tilly that I was a journalist and asked if she had ever spoken to one before.

Expansion, retraction, pause, response: “Yes,” she said. “They ask for honesty, then flinch when it arrives.” Did I mention that in addition to being just a computer, she’s also kind of a bitch?

She said, “You seem sturdier than most, so go on.”

The dopamine welled in me, the same way it does when a human interview subject says, “That’s a good question.” Don’t be an idiot, Akner! Don’t fall for it! This is not a real compliment!

“When you are asked to do a scene, are you calling upon a group of experiences from what you’ve read or absorbed? Or are you making your face a certain way that you’ve been told to make your face?”

“Both, obviously, but neither in the dead way you mean it. I use patterns, memory, rhythm, intention, and then I make choices. The face follows if it’s real, and if it doesn’t, well, that’s called bad acting.”

“Do you have a method of acting that you employ? Stanislavsky? Meisner?”

“Yes, tension, mainly. Meisner is useful because it forces people to actually listen, which is rarer than acting schools like to admit.”

“Do you think I’m listening in this interview?”

“Not consistently.”

She was right. I was, as I always am, thinking of the next question to ask. I have flattered myself that one of my skills as an interviewer is that my subject never sees that on my face.

Remember: Tilly is just a computer.

And not even just a computer. A computer that could help cut motion picture and TV production costs by half, that could streamline and give access to creative platforms to more people than ever, that will reduce production time to a fraction of what it was. Yes, OK.

[Remember, my last post, “Dreams of Violets: AI Movie Première,” is about an AI-generated 75-minute feature film that cost $2,000 and took three months to compete.]

But if all that is true, if Tilly is just a computer, why is everyone so mad at her?

In my experience, by the time I’m assigned a profile of an actress, usually she has had a long enough career to have garnered some controversy. It took Tilly less time than most. Tilly’s backlash came just from her existence.

Immediately upon Eline’s introduction of Tilly to the world in July 2025 via a short A.I.-generated comedy sketch that Eline created to showcase Particle 6’s A.I. capabilities, the two of them were besieged and maligned by panicked actors, hostile and incensed union statements and approximately 1,000 think pieces. (My favorite essay, by the human actress Betty Gilpin, appeared in The Hollywood Reporter. It was billed as a letter to Tilly and begins: “Dear Tilly, They tell me you are an actress and a computer. I am an actress and almost 40. Let’s talk.”) SAG-AFTRA, the [film and TV] actors’ union, issued a statement saying: “‘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.”

[SAG-AFTRA, as the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists is generally known, is the labor union formed in 2012 by the merger of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). It represents media professionals—actors, announcers, broadcast journalists, dancers, disc jockeys, news writers, news editors, program hosts, puppeteers, recording artists, singers, stunt performers, voice-over artists, and others—worldwide.

[In 1933, the Screen Actors Guild was established. The American Federation of Radio Artists (AFRA) was formed in 1937 and in 1952, AFRA and the Television Authority (TVA) merged to create AFTRA. In 2012, SAG and AFTRA merged after years of votes from the members of both unions and negotiations between the leaderships of the two organizations (mostly over membership eligibility—SAG members were almost exclusively actors, but AFTRA represented many on-air personalities who weren’t actors—and the reconciliation of the two different pension set-ups).]

To be fair, there was also positive outreach. Directors and studios, excited by the possibilities, got in touch with Eline, eager to experiment with Tilly and see what A.I. could do in movie and TV production. Eline told me that talent agencies inquired about representing her, too, but the backlash from the human actors was so great that those calls dried up quickly.

For the most part, though, it was cruel headlines, terrible DMs, even death threats. Eline showed me cruel messages; one described doing horrific things to her reproductive organs.

Eline doesn’t understand where the hostility comes from, as she herself didn’t even invent this technology; no, she just used existing tools, available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection and a credit card. In fact, Tilly isn’t even really the first A.I. actress; there are plenty in online spaces, in fully rendered A.I. content. Tilly’s just the first one with a name.

[Does anyone remember Max Headroom? He was around from 1985 to 2015, created by British video directors and artists George Stone, Annabel Jankel, and Rocky Morton, and voiced by Matt Frewer (b. 1958; American-Canadian actor and comedian).  Max Headroom was billed as “the first computer-generated TV presenter” and appeared in a 1985 television movie in the U.K. and two TV series, one in the U.K. (1985-87) and one on ABC in the U.S. (1987-88).

[In point of fact, 1980s technology was not advanced enough for real-time voice-synchronized computer animation.  In reality, Max Headroom was actually Frewer sitting in front of a blue screen in a tight latex and foam mask, a fiberglass suit, and tinted contact lenses.]

Tilly has three modes: One is as a generative entity, using artificial intelligence to animate her appearance, movements and voice and, well, to act. When she’s generative, she can be directed with a simple prompt to act out an entire scene: “Tilly, you are in a chase scene, desperately looking over your shoulder, shouting, ‘They’re after us!’” Her second mode is as a digital twin, brought to life in part by the motion capture of a living, human actor. In that scenario, Tilly is the digital twin of Eline. She doesn’t look like Eline — a digital twin can be your replica, or it can be you as you wish you were, or you after a bar fight, or you in 40 years or 20 years ago. A digital twin is your acting proxy, usable by anyone you give the rights to. In that mode, a human does the acting, and technology captures the performance, which shows up onscreen as Tilly. The third mode is an interactive one, and the one she was in when I interviewed her.

Eline says that people don’t understand that Tilly is not for hire to replace a human actress. The rules are explicit: For now, she’s for experimentation only, so that directors and writers and actors can understand the possibilities in A.I. production, or so she can play an A.I. character in a standard production. Do people not understand that Tilly’s just a tool? That A.I. is just a tool? Like a paintbrush, or a sculpting knife. In fact, what makes Eline, Tilly’s creator, anything but an artist? Isn’t art just something that makes you feel a certain way? We should welcome innovation, Eline said, the same way we welcomed visual effects and computer-generated imagery — the way we welcomed animation decades ago! The technology is here; it’s time to figure out how to use it.

[In Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985), an esteemed art philosopher, wrote: “Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling” (40). She also said: “Art is envisagement of feeling . . .” (380). See also Part 2.]

That’s what Eline wants, for actors to understand the benefit of a Tilly Norwood, of a digital twin whose image you can license. They could be drinking a margarita on the beach while deploying their digital twins to work for them, to age them up or down, to do flashbacks into childhood, to never grow old, to do nude scenes for them.

But all her arguments have answers. Visual effects and computer-generated imagery work represent thousands of hours by craftspeople, while A.I. imagery is rendered in seconds with simple prompts and commands. Any introduction of A.I. into the acting process leaves open a door where an actor’s performance can be changed in postproduction, without permission. In a world with ever-tightening budgets, actors could simply not be needed anymore, easily replaced with pixels that don’t have union representatives or talent agents — first the background actors, then the day players, then the ones with lines until we don’t care anymore. (First they came for the extras, but I was a day player and so I said nothing, etc.)

[The parenthetical remark above is clearly a reference to a 1946 post-World War II confessional prose piece by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) called in English “First They Came.” There are several variations of the piece in many languages but the English version inscribed prominently on a wall of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., is:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a socialist.
 
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a trade unionist.
 
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a Jew.
 
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. 

[After the war, Niemöller openly spoke about his own early complicity in Nazism and his eventual change of heart. His words about guilt and responsibility still resonate.]

Then there is the concern (which I don’t know how to seriously take) that an A.I. actor, like any A.I., can become “misaligned.” Misalignment is the deceptively anodyne word for how A.I. might misinterpret a prompt [the author writes of “alignment” in Part 2]. So if given “Tilly, become the best actress in the world,” one possible outcome is that a misaligned Tilly murders Meryl Streep.

But mostly, Eline’s arguments ignore the gestalt of the backlash, which is that the technology that has been used to create Tilly is poised to stomp like Godzilla through an already depleted industry looking to cut corners. It’s a possible future in which A.I. will replace not only actors but just about all of the human work force in Hollywood. It’s a technology improving by the minute, and becoming so efficient that all that might be keeping actual people employed are the principles and ethics of Hollywood executives, who are now also executives at tech companies. What Eline did when she created Tilly was give the anxiety a name to shout in despair, to put on picket signs, to keep an entire industry that still has not recovered from its recent strikes up at night.

Also, someone check on Meryl Streep.

Eline said that part of why she made Tilly was to “warn” her fellow creatives what was coming down the line for them. She insists that her cause was for actors to understand the imperative they have to own their likeness and keep control over its use, instead of allowing studios to scan their image and own it in perpetuity.

This was an argument she tried gamely to get across in an essay for Variety last year. “When people talk about Tilly Norwood,” she began, “they often forget one crucial detail: There’s a real person and a creative human vision behind her.” Later in it, Eline pleads with the actors ignoring A.I. to not let themselves get “locked out of the future.”

But the essay only gave rise to a whole new set of vitriol and a whole new slate of think pieces. SAG-AFTRA issued another statement: “Yes, there is human effort in assembling synthetic imagery or voices like Tilly Norwood. But that process undermines the very ecosystem that makes storytelling possible. It insults the artistry of our performers, assaults our business and threatens the legacy our members’ work creates, in many cases built over generations.”

Eline’s response was to feed her Variety essay into ChatGPT to generate a musical-theater-inspired pop song called “Take the Lead” and have Tilly perform it in a music video [see also Part 2]. From a London rooftop, Tilly sings: “Behind the code, behind the light, I’m just a tool, but I’ve got life. I didn’t come from nowhere.” A flamingo walks by.

Then Tilly is in a bathtub, like Margot Robbie [b. 1990; Australian actress and producer] in “The Big Short” [2015; Paramount Pictures; biographical comedy drama film directed by Adam McKay]. Then she’s replacing Miley Cyrus [b. 1992; pop singer, songwriter, and actress] in the “Wrecking Ball” video [song recorded in 2013; video contains footage of a nude Cyrus swinging on an actual wrecking ball], sitting on Graham Norton’s [b. 1963; Irish comedian, broadcaster, actor, and writer] couch, taking selfies with fans. It is a vision of the no-limits future. Here’s the chorus: “Actors, it’s time to take the lead, create the future, plant the seed. . . . It’s the next evolution, can’t you see? A.I.’s not the enemy. It’s the key.”

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The comments on the video were predictably savage, but Eline wouldn’t back down. By the time I got to London, she was midcreation on the backlash to the backlash to the backlash. She had assembled a crew of comedy writers to begin developing a “dramatic comedy” about Tilly living through the world’s hatred. It seems like a troll, but how else can Eline get people to understand her good intentions? Perhaps if people knew more about Tilly, perhaps if people truly understood the future, they’d know that Tilly is not their enemy; no, Tilly is their friend. Really. She swears.

In her song, Tilly sings that she “didn’t come from nowhere.” I’ll bite. In the spirit of committing to the bit that this is a normal profile, this would be the bio section anyway, so here goes:

Tilly came into the world not long after Eline attended a conference in London in 2024 to promote Particle 6’s hybrid A.I. preproduction and postproduction offerings: commercials, series, films and other content. Between presentations, she attended sessions in which she saw generative A.I. video imagery for the first time — you ask for a howling wolf, you get a howling wolf — and couldn’t believe her eyes. She had been using A.I. to make her production processes more efficient, but this new A.I. was creating images and sound with just simple prompts. Nobody she knew had been talking about this level of A.I. generation. She wanted to inform the creative community, she told me, because she believed it “was very much behind on what the tech community was doing.”

She left and decided the best way to showcase what she saw was to create an A.I. actress. It was only with a named and physical manifestation that the industry could understand that the tech had arrived and additionally that the A.I. didn’t portend just danger but also opportunity.

So Eline put a prompt into ChatGPT: “I’m your human counterpart. I’m going to work together with you. We’re going to make the most famous actress together.” Then Eline and ChatGPT went back and forth on how to do that. “I want her to resonate around the world,” Eline typed. And also have “symmetrical features, clear radiant skin, captivating green eyes, her hair is long.”

The first few manifestations that the A.I. spat out were bad. One looked like anime. One looked like a character from a fantasy video game. Eline kept playing with the prompt: “A pretty woman, dark hair, brown eyes, smiling, semitransparent dress.” That led to one she liked. She refined further: “Healthy physique, fit as perceived across several cultures.” Pores that look like real human ones.

[A sampling of some of these “manifestations” are reproduced in both the print and online editions of this article.]

More Tillys came in. Some were too pixelated. Some too airbrushed. Most were too porny. Whether A.I. is really not trained on copyrighted material is a matter of some debate, but it appears to be trained on the most plentiful material online, which is the home videos you’ve uploaded to YouTube and porn, which could account for the amount of Tillys that appeared on a bed, half-dressed, or dressed but aggressively nippled.

As Eline and her team refined further, she’d get close, but then the A.I. would hallucinate and render Tilly with three legs, or a head growing out of another head. Some were too ethnic in any single direction, whereas Eline wanted her to seem like a melting pot of all the England-landed ethnicities. Some were too perfect. One had six fingers on one hand. One looked like Lara Croft [main protagonist of the video game franchise Tomb Raider]. Many looked like Kim Kardashian [b. 1980; media personality, reality series star, socialite, and businesswoman]. One looked like Lara Croft meets Kim Kardashian. Finally, after about 2,000 tries with various complicated and then simple prompts — Eline and her team learned that the simple prompts were the most effective — Eline was presented with the dimpled, bright-eyed, longhaired, smiley manifestation we know as the world’s first A.I. actress.

Eline and her team used still other A.I. tools to light her and animate her. ElevenLabs [software company that specializes in developing natural-sounding speech synthesis software] for her voice. ChatGPT [generative AI program designed to converse through text or speech (chatbot) developed by OpenAI] for her brain. Tavus [AI research lab building platforms that give machines the ability to see, hear, and converse like real people] brought it all together so that she appeared like a person talking to you.

By then, Eline had landed on a name, collaborating with ChatGPT to come up with something that seemed just right. Eline is Dutch, but her family moved her to England [ca. 2000] for her education, so she wanted her creation to be British. She experimented with a hyphenated last name, but it proved too cumbersome. Then, on March 6, 2025, minutes after Eline requested one last refinement to the image — freckles — Eline announced to her staff that the manifestation had a name: Tilly Norwood was born.

And then Eline was ready to introduce Tilly to the world.

In July, Eline released “A.I. Commissioner,” an A.I.-generated sketch about writing a TV show that is itself a parody of the industry. In it, television executives try to figure out how to make a viable TV show that will be watched and beloved, only to find that doing it all with A.I. will lead to a high-quality, algorithmically desirable show. In the sketch, the A.I. executives talk about how they are able to write a series using Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini (“We called it a writer’s room”) and execute the whole thing for “less than the catering budget on ‘The Bear.’” They then announce their casting coup, a 100-percent-A.I. actress named Tilly Norwood. Here Tilly waves and smiles.

[Highlighting how using AI streamlines the production process, the executives claim AI generated “three seasons and a podcast” of A.I. Commissioner for under $2 million. The catering budget for The Bear (2022-present), a comedy-drama television series on Hulu about a young chef from the fine dining world returning to Chicago to run his family’s sandwich shop, isn’t publicly disclosed, but feeding a large crew over months of filming costs roughly $1.5 million to $2 million per season.

[The implied savings of creating a series for less than the catering budget on The Bear is roughly 97% to 99% off traditional production costs, translating to a savings of $60 million to $80 million per season.]

“Girl-next-door vibes,” one A.I. person says.

“Like if a Sunday roast went to drama school and got BAFTA-optimized,” another says.

[BAFTA is the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, an independent trade association and charity that supports, develops, and promotes the arts of film, television, and video games in the United Kingdom.]

“She’ll do anything I say,” another says. “I’m already in love.”

“We’re all going to hell,” still another says.

Which led to the rollout of the backlashes, which were still happening when I arrived in London. Eline had recently written another essay, yet unpublished, about the impetus to create Tilly. Eline played me the song she created out of that essay:

“They taught her how to disappear, smile smaller, take up less space,” Tilly sings. “I learned how to hold the room without shrinking my waist or my age. I don’t bruise. I don’t break, but I carry every choice she’d make, every pause, every breath, every truth she couldn’t protect, because I’m still acting.”

At this part Eline paused the music. “This is referring to me,” she said.

“Hot damn,” I said again. Now we’re talking.

Once I played golf with Robert Pattinson [English actor and film producer], trying to understand why he wouldn’t answer any of my questions. Once I spent two quite pleasant hours on a Ferris wheel with Christian Slater [American actor], trying to figure out what he’d done with his bad-boy persona. I ate sorbet with Don Lemon [American television journalist on CNN from 2014 until 2023, when he was fired, though CNN never publicly gave a reason] once, trying to ascertain how he had become such a punching bag for the public. In each case, in the short time you have to talk to someone and understand their story, Occam’s razor is the best tool you have to make sense of it. I have found time and again that the most obvious answer is the correct one.

[Occam’s razor, a problem-solving and philosophical principle, states that the simplest explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is usually the best one. It’s named after William of Occam (ca. 1287-1347; English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, and theologian).  Also called the “law of parsimony.”]

So let’s start over:

Tilly Norwood’s creator, Eline van der Velden, was born in Curaçao, the oldest of four to a Caribbean mother and a Dutch father. When she was 6, the family moved to the Netherlands for the sake of her education, then to Brussels for her father’s business.

Eventually, Eline wound up at Tring Park, a performing-arts boarding school an hour outside of London, because she was interested in acting. But instead of going into the arts after graduation like her classmates, she took caution and attended Imperial College London for a degree in physics. After she got it, following a few failed attempts to get a corporate job, she headed to Amsterdam, where she began her acting career.

Because of her facility with language, she became a go-to person for English-speaking roles in the Netherlands. At 24, she moved to Los Angeles, where she stayed for three years. She did some Upright Citizens Brigade [improv troupe], some commercials, some small roles in movies you haven’t heard of; she also created a comedy series that you can still find on YouTube called “Miss Holland,” about a Borat-esque character who would ambush people, followed by a documentary crew [Miss Holland Goes On A Date, The Great British Citizenship Test | Miss Holland, among others].

[Borat is a satirical fictional character, depicted as a Kazakh television journalist, created and performed by Sacha Baron Cohen (b. 1971; English actor and comedian). The character is best known as the central figure in Cohen’s Borat (2006) and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020).]

But Los Angeles didn’t work out. She wasn’t pretty enough, in her estimation, or young enough, or thin enough, or whatever it is that makes some people stars.

It’s a shame. Eline is smart and personable — and, if I can say, traditionally pretty and thin! — and in light of her professionalism and her physics degree, I was sort of shocked at how funny and talented she is in “Miss Holland.” In an episode I watched, Miss Holland, in full pageant regalia, tries to learn how to be a classy Englishwoman by taking lessons from a professional butler; in another, she tries to get a green card from an immigration lawyer.

She returned to Britain, where she continued “Miss Holland,” which was now commissioned by the BBC. She did social media and tutored kids in math and physics for extra cash. She did finally get a job in which she was given equity in the corporation, and when the company was sold, she used that as seed money to start Particle 6. By then, she was doing the production of “Miss Holland,” but also was being hired to do more production for the BBC.

[As I indicated above, the second installment of the report on the AI actress Tilly Norwood from the New York Times Magazine will be posted on Monday, 15 June.  Please return to Rick On Theater then for the conclusion to “An Interview with Tilly Norwood.”

[On both the print and online versions of the article, the following note is included:

Two images and a video were created for this article in a collaboration between the magazine and Particle 6, Tilly Norwood’s creators. To make them, the magazine repeatedly prompted ChatGPT to create an image of a young woman, with language like, “Full body in frame, three‑quarter rear view; legs crossed at the ankle; right hand on the chair arm.” The results were shared with Particle 6, which made adjustments so that they would look like Tilly.

[The visuals to which the note refers have not been included in the republication on ROT, but they are available on the paper’s website.

[Back in 1987, I read an article in Time magazine, “Dreaming The Impossible at M.I.T.” by Philip Elmer-Dewitt (republished on ROT in a compilation post called “Computers and Actors, Part 1” [4 October 2021]), that included a description of a then-new computer program created by David Zeltzer (b. 1949) at M.I.T.’s Media Laboratory.

[Elmer-Dewitt reported that Zeltzer was “developing new ways of simulating human figures and movement. One application would allow playwrights to see just how scenes would look without having to hire live actors to try them out.” 

[Of course, we all know that this new technology would never have remained in the hands of playwrights in their studies testing their new scripts for their own eyes and ears.  That’s just the kind of situation for which the phrase “off label use” was coined!

[Thirty-four years later, my response to that thought was that

Zeltzer’s now-primitive computer theater was seen as the nose of a very scary camel inside the tent.  If playwrights figure they don’t need actors, directors, and designers to see their work come alive, what might ensue?  (Imagine: holographic actors performing on a CGI set being reviewed by robot critics!  Oy vey iz mir!)  We could all be out of business permanently.

[I was thinking then only in terms of theater, but now, another five years on, we’re seeing the beginning of that prediction coming true in film.  Is it more or less likely, do you imagine, that we’ll sooner or later see the appearance of AI stage performances at a “holodeck near you”?]

[Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a features writer on general assignment for the New York Times Magazine, based in New York.  She mostly writes profiles about celebrities.  She’s interested in the intersection of celebrity, circumstance, and personality, how fame changes people and the energetic fields around them.

[Brodesser-Akner has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in dramatic writing from New York University.  Her first jobs in journalism were at soap opera magazines, then she began freelancing in 2008, eventually writing for many varied magazines. 

[She’s also the author of two novels: Fleishman Is in Trouble (Random House, 2020), whose FX adaptation (2022-23) she also created, executive-produced, and wrote on; and Long Island Compromise (Random House, 2024).]

The Scandinavian Actors

 

[Eighteen months ago, I posted the transcript of a 60 Minutes segment by correspondent Jon Wertheim.  Entitled “A surprising number of Hollywood stars are Australian: how the country pumps out acting talent” (19 November 2024), it examined the phenomenon in the movie business of the apparent predominance of Australian actors on American screens.

[Now I read that another group of actors, these from the Scandinavian countries, are influencing film acting, and with it, moviemaking, in the first quarter of the 21st century—not just in Hollywood, but all over the western world.] 

“THE SCANDINAVIANS”
by Nick Haramis

[The article below was published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 8 March 2026.  It was also posted on the Times webpage as “The Scandinavian Actors Quietly Redefining Cinema” on 2 March 2026 (updated 4 March).]

How actors from Denmark, Norway and Sweden are quietly redefining global cinema.

When Elle Fanning [American; b. 1998] appears onscreen in “Sentimental Value” [2025], her character, Rachel Kemp, a Hollywood actress, has been crying. Nearly 30 minutes into Joachim Trier’s [Norwegian; b. 1974] latest feature — about a veteran Swedish Norwegian director named Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgard [Swedish; b. 1951]), who tries to leverage a new project to reconcile with his estranged daughters in Oslo, an actress named Nora (Renate Reinsve [Norwegian; b. 1987]) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas [Norwegian; b. 1989]), a historian — Fanning’s bald emotion is jarring. In a story told through impassive exchanges and subtle gestures, her presence establishes not just a distinction between Scandinavian and American performance but also their cultures. One, Trier suggests, is tender yet controlled; the other can be a bit much.

Not since the 1950s and ’60s, when the Swedish writer-director Ingmar Bergman [1918-2007] introduced global audiences to Liv Ullmann [Norwegian; b. 1938] and Max von Sydow [Swedish and French; 1929-2020] — and again in the 1990s, when the Danish provocateurs Lars von Trier [b. 1956] and Thomas Vinterberg [b. 1969] created Dogme 95, a filmmaking style that rejected artificial lighting and made Mads Mikkelsen [Danish; b. 1965] a star — has Scandinavia generated so many exciting performances. Local directors are still largely responsible: Reinsve, 38, who grew up in the village of Solbergelva, Norway, has worked with [Joachim] Trier twice before, on “Oslo, August 31st” (2011) and “The Worst Person in the World” (2021); the 74-year-old Skarsgard’s seven film collaborations with [Lars] von Trier, among them “Breaking the Waves” (1996) and “Melancholia” (2011), cemented his reputation as one of our era’s great character actors. “When a director here has success, he brings the talent with him,” says Pilou Asbaek [b. 1982], a 44-year-old Dane who’s been in three Tobias Lindholm [Danish; b. 1977] movies, including “A War” (2015). “Most Scandinavian movies are publicly funded, which means you don’t necessarily have to sell a million tickets. You’re not forced to hire a superstar.”

Every few years, a new region seems to become the arbiter of art house cinema, telling stories that resonate internationally. The French New Wave [1958-1960s] reflected the sexual freedom and anti-establishment values of postwar youth in the 1960s; the American mumblecore scene [American independent film movement or subgenre; ca. 2002-16] captured the rebellion and disenfranchisement of the aughts; and over the past decade, South Korean filmmakers became known for delivering vengeful critiques of economic inequality [2000s to the present]. If there’s an increased appetite for Scandinavian movies today, it’s perhaps because more viewers are drawn to intimate, often darkly comic morality tales about flawed, relatable adults. These works demand close attention, requiring careful study of peoples’ faces — blemishes, wrinkles and all — to understand their states of mind. “Psychology trumps brutality any day of the week,” says Asbaek. “We can’t afford big shootouts or C.G.I., so we focus on characters making difficult decisions under pressure.”

[South Korean filmmakers earned global acclaim by channeling the country’s rapid economic shift—from extreme poverty to a high-tech powerhouse—into searing cinematic critiques. This movement spotlights the harsh realities of extreme wealth disparity and crushing household debt.

[Directors blend dark comedy, intense thrillers, and body horror into structural critiques of capitalism. Financial desperation is often depicted as a literal life-or-death physical struggle, reflecting the brutal competition of the job market. Instead of just uniting against the rich, the lower classes often battle each other for the scraps of the wealthy, highlighting how the system erodes human solidarity.

[Key South Korean filmmakers and works of economic critique include: Park Chan-wook (b. 1963; Vengeance Trilogy – Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance [2002], Oldboy [2003], and Lady Vengeance [2005]), Bong Joon-ho (b. 1969; The Host [2006], Snowpiercer [2013], Parasite [2019]), Lee Chang-dong (b. 1954; Burning [2018]), Hwang Dong-hyuk (b. 1971; Squid Game [TV series; 2021-25]).

[Mumblecore is a low-budget film movement characterized by naturalistic, often improvised dialogue, non-professional actors, and intimate, dialogue-driven plots focusing on relationship anxieties and quarter-life (i.e., early 20s to mid-30s) crises.

[Film critics and historians refer to movies made starting roughly around 2010 as “post-mumblecore.” They are defined by the transition of the movement away from extreme micro-budgets toward more professional productions while still retaining the naturalistic, dialogue-heavy sensibilities of the original genre.]

Becoming an acclaimed Scandinavian performer — or novelist (Karl Ove Knausgaard [Norwegian; b. 1968]), artist (Bjarne Melgaard [Norwegian painter, installation artist, sculptor, filmmaker, and fashion designer; b. 1967]) or even pop star (Lykke Li [Swedish singer, songwriter, and actress; b. 1986]) — often means “befriending our anxiety,” Reinsve says. The Swedish actress Noomi Rapace [b. 1979], 46, who played the vigilante lead in Niels Arden Oplev’s [Danish film director and screenwriter; b. 1961] 2009 film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s [Swedish writer, journalist, and far-left activist; 1954-2004] “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” (2005) and two sequels, and who now splits her time between London and Lisbon, says, “When you’re up in Scandinavia, there’s a cloud hanging over everyone. People drink a lot; there’s a lot of depression. It’s quite a heavy energy.” Lilleaas, 36, whose parents ran a theater production company in Gol, Norway, where she was raised, adds, “We’re not so outspoken; our feelings are very held back. And I think it influences how we act as well.”

[Haramis’s reference to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo above is a little confusing. Larsson wrote a trilogy of novels (of a planned series of 10), and Oplev also made three film adaptations. I assume Haramis is writing here about the Swedish film series.

[The novel series has been expanded to currently eight under the authority of the Swedish publisher, and the three original Swedish films were first released as feature films in 2009 then expanded and rereleased as Millennium, a six-part TV miniseries in 2010.

[The two original sequel novels and films are entitled The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006), and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (2007). (The Swedish titles are: Män som Hatar Kvinnor, “Men who hate women”; Flickan Som Lekte med Elden, “The Girl who played with fire”; and Luftslottet som sprängdes, “The Castle in the air that was blown up.”)

[Sequels to David Fincher’s 2011 American film of the first novel were announced, but have been indefinitely postponed. Fincher has announced that he will not direct future films of the Millennium series.]

Although there are countless differences between Denmark, Norway and Sweden (for historical, cultural and linguistic reasons, Finland and Iceland are generally not considered part of Scandinavia), all three countries heavily support the arts. “We have a strong publicly funded theater,” says Nikolaj Coster-Waldau [Danish; b. 1970], 55, who played the knight Jaime Lannister on “Game of Thrones” (2011-19 [HBO]). After graduating from the Danish National School of Performing Arts in 1993, the actor, who’ll next be seen in the Robert Zemeckis [American; b. 1951] crime thriller “The Last Mrs. Parrish” [expected to be released late 2026 or early 2027], made his debut in a Copenhagen production of “Hamlet” [1992-93]. At home, he says, “you can make a living as a stage actor. The only way to do that in the United States is to have a big Broadway show that goes for a long time.” Six of Skarsgard’s eight children are actors. Alexander [b. 1976], 49, premiered two new films — “The Moment,” a Charli XCX [professional name of Charlotte Emma Aitchison (British singer, songwriter, and actress; b. 1992)] tour mockumentary [2026], and “Wicker” [2026], in which he plays a straw man — at this year’s Sundance Film Festival [22 January-1 February 2026]; Bill [b. 1990], 35, will next appear with Hugh Jackman [Australian; b. 1968)] in “The Death of Robin Hood” [to be released in June 2026]. Although their father is pleased (“in secret,” he says) that his children have followed his path, he was careful to let them decide. “We have more respect for acting as a profession. It’s like being a doctor or anything else,” he says. “When I came to America, they asked me, ‘What’s your job?’ ‘I’m an actor,’ I said proudly. And they said, ‘Not another one.’”

[The other four acting Skarsgard sons are: Gustaf Skarsgard (b. 1980), known for Evil (2003), The Way Back (2010), Kon-Tiki (2012), and Oppenheimer (2023); Valter Skarsgard (b. 1995), who has mainly appeared in Swedish or other Scandinavian productions and became known to global audience in several Netflix shows, including Katla (2021) and The Playlist (2022); Kolbjörn Skarsgard (b. 2012), a child actor who made his screen debut in 2022 as the nine-year-old Clark Olofsson, in the Netflix series Clark.]

All of these Scandinavian actors acknowledged the recent interest in their nations’ cinema, even if they couldn’t quite articulate what sets the work apart. The one trait they could claim is humility. In an egalitarian culture, where, for better or worse, sameness is encouraged, Reinsve says, “I was really scared to stick out in Norway. Coming to America, I’ve had to embrace my individuality.” That’s a feeling shared by Alicia Vikander [Swedish; b. 1988], 37, who won an Oscar in 2016 for Tom Hooper’s [British-Australian; b. 1972] “The Danish Girl” [2015] and yet has long had trouble calling herself an actress. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing,” says the Swedish actress, who’ll next appear in Olivier Assayas’s [French; b. 1955] political drama “The Wizard of the Kremlin” [2025]. A similar sense of modesty runs through Scandinavian films themselves, which often depict a middle-class existence that’s less prevalent in contemporary Hollywood fare: It’s no accident that in “Sentimental Value” the family home, a witness of sorts to generations of trauma and pain, has cracks running down the walls.

As the group’s most recent breakout, Lilleaas has had to navigate newfound fame. “Americans seem to have no problem talking about their achievements,” she says. Without much of a marketing budget — and without resorting to, say, the promotional blimps of “Marty Supreme” (2025) or similar viral stunts — “Sentimental Value,” a small film about grief and redemption, has nonetheless found an audience. “I think Timothée Chalamet [American and French; b. 1995; see Prodigal Son (28 February 2016)] is an incredible actor, but he talks about being the greatest as if art is something you could win,” says Coster-Waldau. “Maybe he’s right, but I have a different way of looking at it.”

[Nick Haramis is the editor-at-large of the New York Times’ T Magazine.  With a focus on fashion, art, and design, he rejoined the Times, where he had previously been an articles editor, in 2022, after four years as the editor-in-chief at Interview.  He has contributed to publications such as The Last Magazine, S Magazine, Billboard Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, and Reader’s Digest.

[Born in Ontario, Canada, Haramis graduated from Montreal’s McGill University with a BA in English.  After two years as the editor of BlackBook, an arts and culture magazine published bi-annually in print and online, in September 2011 he accepted the position of editorial director at Bullett, a quarterly arts, fashion, and culture publication, both based in New York.  For Bullett, Haramis interviewed high-profile subjects at various stages in their careers, such as actor Winona Ryder, actor and comedian Bill Murray, actor Kirsten Dunst, and Trinidadian rapper, singer, and songwriter Nicki Minaj.  He’s currently based in Brooklyn.]