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. 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. 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, 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.”

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.

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).]

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. 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. 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 on 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).]

'Dreams of Violets': AI Movie Première

 

[In recent weeks, both the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the union that represents professionals in the media, including film and television, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization which presents the Academy Awards, commonly known as the Oscars, have enacted firm rules to restrict artificial intelligence. 

[SAG-AFTRA secured a tentative agreement imposing stricter rules on synthetic characters, among other restrictions.  In May, the union reached a tentative four-year contract agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers which, while it doesn’t completely ban synthetic digital characters, it heavily disincentivizes their use.  Studios must prove that a synthetic character adds “significant additional value” that a live union actor can’t provide.

[If a studio wishes to use a fully synthetic performer (like, say, Tilly Norwood), it must formally notify SAG-AFTRA and enter a specific negotiation and arbitration system.  If an agreement isn’t reached, the union can arbitrate for damages that exceed standard human-actor compensation. 

[Pending ratification by the membership, the SAG-AFTRA contract with AMPTP will run from 1 July 2026 through 30 June 2030.

[Also in May, the Academy updated its eligibility rules for the 99th Academy Awards (scheduled for March 2027), drawing a hard line around core creative categories.  Only roles “credited in the film’s legal billing and demonstrably performed by humans with their consent” are eligible for Academy Awards.  This effectively bans synthetic or fully AI-generated performers from receiving acting nominations.

[The rules also now explicitly codify that screenplays must be entirely "human-authored to be eligible" for Best Original or Adapted Screenplay.  Submitters must sign a formal declaration confirming human creation; false declarations result in immediate disqualification.

[Generative AI remains permitted in technical fields like Best Visual Effects.  The Academy stated that AI tools used outside of acting and writing will “neither help nor harm” a film’s overall nomination chances.

[The AMPAS restrictions take effect immediately for the 99th Academy Awards cycle and apply to all feature films with a qualifying theatrical release between 1 January and 31 December 2026.  The Board of Governors reviews its campaign and eligibility rules annually, however, so these AI guidelines will be re-evaluated and potentially updated every spring ahead of future Oscar cycles.

[So, now Dreams of Violets, a 75-minute feature-length docudrama that is the first fully AI-generated live-action feature film ever accepted into the official lineup of a marquee film festival, is scheduled to make its world première on Wednesday, 10 June 2026—that’s three days from now.

[(Hell Grind, a 2026 95-minute AI-generated sci-fi action-fantasy movie made by Aitore Zholdaskali [b. 1996], director and co-writer, and Adilkhan Yerzhanov [b. 1982], co-writer, two experienced and respected Kazakh filmmakers based in Almaty, premièred on 16 May 2026 at the Cannes Film Festival.  It was, however, a peripheral event of the festival, not in the official program.

[(The Tribeca Film Festival takes place from Wednesday, 3, to Sunday, 14 June, in New York City at various locations around Manhattan.  The screening of Dreams of Violets on the 10th will be at the AMC 19th Street East 6, located at 890 Broadway at East 19th Street in the Flat Iron District of Manhattan, near Union Square.  [For the festival, the theater is designated the “AMC Flat Iron Theatre.”  This is a temporary event name used for special film screenings hosted at the Tribeca Festival.])

[Because every visual aspect, background, and character was built using generative AI platforms, the film’s première has sparked significant discussion regarding the ethics and future of AI technology in Hollywood filmmaking.  The primary controversy surrounding Dreams of Violets is the displacement of human jobs in the film industry, as the feature was created by just two filmmakers on a $2,000 budget, eliminating traditional roles like actors, cinematographers, and set designers.

[On other topics, critics question whether AI-generated content possesses genuine human emotion and soul.  Controversy also remains over whether AI models were trained on copyrighted works without permission or compensation.  Finally, purists argue that major festivals like Tribeca should exclusively honor traditional, human-made cinema (essentially the same issue that the new Academy Awards rules address).

[After I heard the report “A.I. Backlash” by business and technology correspondent Jo Ling Kent on the CBS Evening News of 29 May, I was interested enough to look a little more into this film “made with no lights, no cameras, and no actors.”  Below are the results of my investigation.]

Tehran, January 2026. Dreams of Violets is a 75-minute docudrama feature inspired by real events from 47 years of Iranian civilian resistance.  Through the eyes of five strangers, it brings protest footage to life with raw immediacy.

—From the producers’ plot précis

“At this time in history when both artificial intelligence and Iran are central to global conversation, [Dreams of Violets] offers audiences a rare and intimate perspective into a conflict many have not been able to fully see or understand,” said Jane Rosenthal, Tribeca Festival co-founder with Robert de Niro, in a statement.  

Let’s do the fundamentals first. 

Dreams of Violets is a fictional, Farsi-language (Persian) docudrama running one hour and 14 minutes that was entirely generated by artificial intelligence.  It was made in the United Kingdom by Fountain 0, a “film studio that blends traditional creative principles with frontier technologies to produce previously impossible movies and TV shows,” according to its own website.  It’s Fountain 0’s initial production.

The movie’s director, writer, and composer is Ash Koosha (who’s also the CEO of Fountain 0); its producers are Ash Koosha and his older brother, Pooya Koosha (co-director of Dreams of Violets and chief technology officer of Fountain 0), who are Tehran-born citizens of the U.K.  

They founded Fountain 0 (pronounced “Fountain Zero”) in 2025 to develop custom-built software to solve the technical limitations of commercial AI tools and to lower the financial barriers associated with traditional filmmaking. 

(Ash Koosha’s birth name is Ashkan Kooshanejad [b. 1985], and he’s also a well-known and popular multi-instrumentalist, composer, and record producer.  He’s based in London.  Pooya Koosha (also known as Pooya Kooshanezhad [b. 1982]—note the variant spellings of the brothers’ family name) is a tech entrepreneur, systems architect, and filmmaker.  He’s based in Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area of California.  When the brothers established their professional careers in the U.K., having fled the Islamic Republic in 2009, they simplified their last names for the Western tech and media industries.)

Dreams of Violets is a fully AI-generated feature film.  As CBS’s Jo Ling Kent reports, there’s “No cast, no crew” and “AI programs . . . generate all of the film's imagery.”

The plot, set against the backdrop of civilian protests in Tehran in January 2026 when the Iranian government perpetrated widespread massacres of civilians, centers on five strangers trapped in a shadowy dead-end alley by a soldier who’s about to execute them, while Amir, a 10-year-old boy with cerebral palsy, watches in a wheelchair from a window above. 

Other elements of the storyline, as related in Rolling Stone, are “unrest . . . stirring outside as people gather on motorcycles.  A separate story follows a woman whose family asks her to stop going out.  And then there’s a man falling from a building, smoke bombs, and an army quelling protesters.”

Nothing that I read, however, provides an interpretation of the movie’s title, Dreams of Violets, and I gather that there are no lines in the script that explain it directly.  The closest there is may be some words heard in the trailer that’s on several sites online, spoken to Amir by a family member as he wheels away from the camera: “Did you know a violet is the only flower that grows in the dark?  The root doesn't need light.  It only needs a crack.  A gap in the earth.  That's all!”

Though not botanically accurate, that line is apparently symbolic of the film’s theme. First, violets bloom in late winter and early spring and thus appear in Iranian and Persian poetry as harbingers of renewal or rebirth after the desolation and deprivations of winter.  (Think of the Prague Spring of 1968 or the Arab Spring in the early 2010s.) 

The “dark” certainly represents the totalitarian regime of the Islamic Republic and the brutal military crackdown under which the movie shows the Iranian citizens living.  The “root” might refer to the generations of Iranians and Persians who came before and cherished and guarded their freedom, as well as those over the past 47 years who’ve resisted tyranny in Iran.  The “crack in the earth,” then, might represent the small gaps where freedom survives today in the Iran the Koosha’s depict. 

The “dreams” of the title, then, would be the Iranian people’s vision of the hopes for the future promised by the metaphorical violets.  Even though the movie takes place in a dark landscape, both literally (the alley) and figuratively due to the communications blackout and the armed repression imposed by the regime, the Kooshas want it to encourage hope—a field of violets growing in the dark, waiting to burst out in color in the awaited sunshine.

The live-action docufiction was filmed in a mere three months at a cost of $2,000, with actors, sets, and cameras replaced by AI models.  Ash Koosha worked at home evenings and weekends while performing his duties as CEO of Claigrid, the bothers’ AI start-up, during the day.

Director Koosha observed, “It would take probably a year or two to get this right” in the tradition process.  “The notion of making films at the speed of news itself is something I’m super interested in.”  

With so “little first-hand journalism” coming out of Iran about the events of last January, Koosha was inspired “to make the first film about” the massacres.

There are no actors, or even digital clones (of either actual actors or real people on the scene) in Dreams of Violets; all the characters, though based on news photographs and videos, are entirely fictional digital models created using generative AI tools. 

The AI movie “is a specific genre, at least for me,” Ash Koosha told CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) News.  It’s a way to tell stories much like animation, says the director-producer.  

Rolling Stone, however, reports that “signs of AI exist in the smudged backgrounds of the shots, but the 83-seconds makes it seem as though Koosha . . . has created a realistic-looking film.”

On the other hand, Business Wire expressed the opinion, “The combination of creativity and technological innovation resulted in a film that appears as realistic as films produced through traditional human labor.”  

The website found that the AI tools were “used to create a remarkably touching, impactful and at times shocking film.”  Business Wire states that Dreams of Violets “is indistinguishable from an independent film with human writers, directors, and actors.”

While the characters’ faces and bodies are entirely fake, their visual designs, emotional expressions, and the scenarios they endure were guided by real photos, journalistic reporting, and eyewitness accounts of the brutal suppression of protests in Iran. 

Co-directors Ash and Pooya Koosha say they designed the synthetic cast this way to capture a sense of raw realism without exploiting the identities—or risking the safety—of actual Iranian citizens and protestors.  Ash Koosha explains that he created the characters by describing people he’s known in the past—though no one living in Iran today—as references.

The Hollywood Reporter recorded that to make Dreams of Violets, in addition to Fountain 0’s own technology, the Koosha brothers used AI software tools like Google’s Nanobanana for imagery and core frames, Kling AI (developed by the Chinese tech company Kuaishou) for video generation from frames, Anthropic’s Claude AI for language-related editing, and Google’s Gemini for helped with researching the project. 

THR further reported that, on the other hand, the writing and editing of the script, the voicing of characters (before alteration by AI), and the movement and positioning (blocking) of the AI-generated actors on screen was all done by Ash Koosha using human creativity.

In a statement recounted in Variety, Ash Koosha acknowledged,

I understand that an AI-generated film about people who actually died raises difficult questions.  I have thought about those questions for every minute of every day I have worked on this film.  My answer is that the alternative — silence, forgetting, the regime’s preferred outcome — is worse.  The film exists because the dead deserve to be witnessed and because the families inside Iran, who cannot speak, deserve someone outside who refuses to forget.

It’s significant to note that this particular story had personal meaning for Pooya and, especially, Ash Koosha.  The movie is far more than an artistic or political mission for its creators.  A recently published report in the Guardian of the U.K. reveals some of the reasons.

Ash Koosha began his career as a musician in Tehran playing in underground rock bands.  Rock music was strictly forbidden by the Iranian Ministry of Culture as part of the regime’s restrictions on Western-influenced music, so Koosha and his band were already in risky territory. 

In 2007, Koosha organized and played in clandestine, underground rock concerts.  After a semi-festival, initially planned as a cultural event with the support of UNICEF, was canceled at the last minute by the government, Koosha and his heavy rock band, Font, moved the gig to a private suburban villa outside Tehran.

The organizers invited 150 people, but word spread quickly in the underground scene, and 700 people showed up.  The authorities used soldiers and hovering helicopters to raid the unauthorized festival and more than 200 attendees and musicians were arrested because not only was rock music forbidden by the regime, but so were mixed-gender gatherings.

Koosha was arrested after the raid and he spent 21 days in a maximum-security prison among high-risk prisoners.  Two years later, in the aftermath of the disputed presidential election of June 2009, the Koosha brothers feared for their freedom. 

The 2007 raid broke up Ash Koosha’s previous band, Font, but the brothers formed a new indie-rock band called Take It Easy Hospital.  Ash was the front man, while Pooya served as the band’s bassist. 

Filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi recruited Ash Koosha and the band to star in his underground docudrama, No One Knows About Persian Cats.  The movie secretly chronicled the plight of underground Iranian musicians like Koosha.

The film premièred at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2009, just as political tensions peaked in Iran.  Following the heavily protested and violently suppressed presidential elections in June 2009, the Iranian regime began ruthlessly hunting down anyone involved in political dissent or unauthorized, Western-influenced media.

Because of their prominent roles in No One Knows About Persian Cats, which won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, and their active participation in the underground scene, the band members were marked by the regime.  Promoting an invitation to perform at a U.K. music festival as their ticket out of Iran, the Koosha brothers and their bandmates left together.  

As soon as they arrived on British soil, they applied for asylum, stating that returning to Tehran would mean immediate imprisonment.  What they saw in 2026 must have seemed like déjà vu.  

It’s not surprising that the Kooshas, especially Ash, would feel strongly about Dreams of Violets.  As Ash Koosha says, “This is a very personal story to us having experienced brutality in Iran.’

As for those engaged in the project, but not viscerally involved, Variety reports that Rosenthal called the film “a powerful example of how emerging technologies like AI can be used not simply as tools of innovation, but as vehicles for deeply human storytelling.” 

“What moved us,” asserted Rosenthal, “was not just the technological achievement, but the emotional immediacy and urgency of the story itself.”  She added that “this film offers audiences a rare and intimate perspective into a conflict many have not been able to fully see or understand.”

According to TechEBlog, an online media outlet and blog that covers the latest technology, Dreams of Violets is “a fiction based on reality” since Ash Koosha focused on “the human aspect” of the Iranian uprising “and not on the chaos itself.”

Although Dreams of Violets is fiction, not a documentary, “I would say 80% of it is a recreation of events that actually happened,” says director Koosha.

Director Ash Koosha observed that he had started to work on the film soon after he saw online reports and videos of the January 2026 massacres (which may have ultimately killed over 36,500 Iranians) before the Internet blackout imposed by the regime. 

“For 72 hours,” he attested, “we saw things that were just horrifying.  It was a bloodbath.”  What he had done until then, either in music or technology, hadn’t been politics.  “This,” he declared, “made me political.”

In a statement quoted by THR, he said that Dreams of Violets couldn’t have even been made if not for AI.  The director wrote:

I want to be honest about why I made it the way I did.  It was not a technological exercise.  I would have preferred to make this film with a crew, with actors, with the dignity of a full production.  That was not available to me.  I am one person, in exile, with no access to Iran, no access to the locations, no access to the people.  The AI pipeline made it possible to do what would otherwise have been impossible: to create a memorial film for an event that happened behind a wall I cannot cross.

Tom Rogers, Fountain 0’s executive chairman, told DealBook, a New York Times newsletter, “The film industry is going to be transformed by A.I.”  He added that Dreams of Violets demonstrated that “great independent films can be made without big studio financial backing”—not to mention actors, designers, camera operators, and stage crews—among other workers. 

So Rogers conceded that there’d be “a lot of consternation” about job displacement as well, considering that AI fears ignited two strikes in the film and TV arena just three years ago (see “2023 Writers Guild Strike” [1 June 2023] and “‘The Actors' Strike Dims a Bright Spot For New York City'” [25 July 2023].)

Furthermore, while Kent on CBS reports on roiling elsewhere in the film-and-TV quadrant of the AI-verse (of a trio of kiddie shows from Amazon MGM that are animated by AI, one creator dropped out prompted by “a backlash” and the creator of another AI-animated series became “horrified and disgusted” when the producers moved without her input), DealBook reports that the première of Dreams of Violets “could ignite a debate about the role of generative A.I. in creating original entertainment and provoke fresh fears about job losses in Hollywood.”

As Fountain 0 is about to début its first feature, the Kooshas see their AI-generated movie model as production-ready for independent filmmakers—despite the prediction that AI will bring about the demise of Hollywood.

Ash Koosha asserts that “for the many independent filmmakers, and would be independent filmmakers, whose biggest barrier is access to money to make their films, Fountian 0 technology solves for the financial barriers they face.”

“There’s no way for me to go get millions of dollars to make” Dreams of Violets, insisted Koosha.

For a traditional “Micro-Budget” film, for instance, the average production cost would be $20,000 to $250,000 in the U.S. or £16,000 ($21,600) to £200,000 ($270,000) in the U.K.  These are typically ultra-low budget projects, self-financed or backed by small investors.

A standard indie feature, which generally employs some union professionals, uses union-scale minimums, and must have enough capital to afford location permits, insurance, and professional post-production, costs from $20,000 to $250,000 in the United States and £350,000 ($472,500) to £1.5 million ($2.025 million) in the U.K.

At the high end, a full studio production requiring union crew rates, substantial visual effects, A-list talent, and comprehensive marketing, if made in the U.S., would cost between $5 million and $100+ million, while a top-end film made in the United Kingdom would run from £4 million ($5.4 million) to £60+ million ($81+ million).

“As a first time film creator, there is no way I could have brought this film to fruition without what our AI tools enabled me to do,” declared Ash Koosha, responding to the anxiety expressed by many in the film world.  

Foundation 0 has two more films in production, and Ash Koosha pledges that “we will actively seek top writer and director talent whose creativity can be harnessed to produce great movies without their imaginations and visions facing any financial constraints.”

Added brother Pooya:

Having been deeply involved for a number of years in how AI could be utilized and tamed at the highest and most sophisticated levels, I realized our video production techniques were way ahead of the rest of the marketplace.  I also realized that our ability for each subsequent film to improve on our AI production techniques is an enormous opportunity for Fountain 0 to exploit.

[If, after Wednesday, there are reviews of Dreams of Violets, I may append one or two to this post.  Come back then if you’re curious about the reception of this AI movie by the press—film and/or tech.  You can be sure I’ll be looking around the ’Net to see what’s being said.

[If there are a range of assessments, it could be very interesting.  One commentator has already raised a disturbing prospect.  In an exchange on the CBC website, Richard Lachman, a professor of digital media at Toronto Metropolitan University and author of Digital Wisdom: Searching for Agency in the Age of AI (Routledge, 2026), put forth that the appearance of AI movies at film festivals could be the source of problems.

On the one hand, he said, there’s been vocal pushback within the industry, but on the other, the technology has the potential to open up access to filmmaking.

“This film was made for $2,000 [US], and it’s in festival competition. So there’s a democratizing effect,” he said. 

“You don’t have access to a huge film crew and sets and A-list actors? Well, you can still make your unique point of view and get it in a film festival.”

But Lachman said he has concerns about how audiences will interpret AI content that looks real.

”We have a lot of expectations of, if it looks like a person, if it looks like photojournalism footage, then I’m going to interpret it as photojournalism footage,” he said.

“So I’m a little worried about just cautioning everyone ‘don’t believe what you see’ because then we won’t be able to believe real news footage in the same way.”

[On top of concerns about job losses in the industry and a diminution of human creativity and human feelings, Lachman raises the issue of a further reduction of faith in news reporting, this time aided and abetted by people who ought to be journalism’s ally, the film producer, rather than the politician.]

Harrison Ford, SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Recipient

 

[On Sunday, 1 March 2026, at the Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall in Los Angeles, the 32nd Annual Actor Awards (known until November 2025 as the Screen Actors Guild Awards) were presented.  That was also the occasion for the presentation (by actor Woody Harrelson [b. 1961]) of the 2025 SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Award.  

[This year’s recipient, the 61st, is actor Harrison Ford, the first to be honored with the newly renamed award. (Up through last year, the award was called the SAG Life Achievement Award because it was originated by the Screen Actors Guild before the 2012 merger with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.)

[The SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Award is the highest honor bestowed by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the media professionals’ union, given annually to a performer who fosters the “finest ideals of the acting profession” through career accomplishments and humanitarian work. 

[The honoree is nominated and chosen by the SAG-AFTRA National Honors and Tributes Committee. The award celebrates lifelong dedication to the craft and society.  To qualify, a candidate must be a well-established performer who has improved the image of the acting profession and maintained active involvement in humanitarian or public service endeavors. 

[Two previous recipients of the award, whose careers have been profiled on Rick On Theater, are Barbra Streisand (17 September 2024), the 59th awardee, and Jane Fonda (22 March 2025), the 60th.] 

“HARRISON FORD: HERO OF OUR HEARTS”

[This Harrison Ford profile appeared in the membership magazine SAG-AFTRA (15.2 – Spring 2026).  It was followed by an interview of Ford by the union president, Sean Astin, which I have also reposted below.]

“I was not an overnight success. I struggled for about 15 years, going from acting jobs to carpentry and back to acting, until I finally got a part in a wildly successful film. None of this happened on my own.”

These simple words from 61st SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Award recipient Harrison Ford [b. 1942], delivered to a room of his fellow actors during The 32nd Annual Actor Awards Presented by SAG-AFTRA, were fitting and expected of an actor whose decades of work have been the blueprint for today’s modern movie hero. Simple yet humble, with special words of thanks and a life’s worth of gratitude to longtime colleagues in the industry, those few sentences showed the audience and viewers exactly what makes Ford something of a hero among his peers: an individual whose screen work and real life retain their own standard of excellence.

THE UNDERDOG

Once upon a time, the Academy Award- and Golden Globe-nominated performer, now 83, was anything but an A-lister. First came his expulsion [for plagiarism, four days before graduation] from Ripon College in Wisconsin — where he enrolled in his first acting class. A short time later, he was dropped from a contract with Columbian [see anecdote in following article] and, after being limited to small roles, left his Universal contract early in search of better opportunities. It was his self-taught vocation of carpentry that enabled him to continue auditioning in Hollywood and instilled within him the long-held values that have enabled him to become exalted in his profession: self-direction, steadfastness, concentration and perseverance.

His work on George Lucas’ American Graffiti in 1973 followed what was already a decade of other onscreen performances. But it was also a step in the right direction, because what came a few years later, in 1976, changed the trajectory of Ford’s career: another chance meeting with Lucas [b. 1944]. One that turned into a favor helping read lines for the director’s upcoming sci-fi production — a little thing called Star Wars [1977], which went on to gross over $410 million at the box office during its theatrical release.

Maybe you’ve heard of Han Solo?

Or perhaps you’re more familiar with another role that came a few years later. That one was for another action film for another director — a guy named Steven Spielberg [b. 1946]. It was called Raiders of the Lost Ark [1981], and it grossed nearly $390 million in theaters.

What started as a career with the odds stacked against him has turned into decades of successes in Ford’s toolbelt.

THE (SOMETIMES) HERO

If Ford’s career has ever been regarded as a stroke of luck, his work in the years following the late ’70s and early ’80s serves to prove any naysayer wrong. He’s played a hero or other “good guy” across genres — Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott’s [b. 1937] futuristic masterpiece Blade Runner [1982]; Detective John Book in the crime thriller Witness [1985; Peter Weir (b. 1944)]; President James Marshall in the action film Air Force One [1997; Wolfgang Petersen (1941-2022)]; and playboy-turned-romantic lead Linus Larrabee in the 1995 film adaptation of Sabrina [Sydney Pollack (1934-2008)].

But what’s made him a favorite among moviegoers and earned him the Golden Globe’s Cecil B. DeMille Award [2002], the Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute [2000], the Cannes Film Festival’s Honorary Palme d’Or [2023] and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame [2003] has been the performances themselves. What Ford has always demonstrated is an understanding of the human spirit that goes beyond surface level. Hidden within the snappy one-liners and scruffy looks of his most notable roles has always been a performer with an innate knowledge of people: their honesty and deceit; their reluctance and sense of responsibility. It’s the times when he gives The Chosen One a helpful push in the right direction — and follows his own advice — that makes him a hero of the galaxy. It’s the moment he sees the half-human fugitives he’s meant to hunt as something more, and whole, that propels a sci-fi flick into a seminal work of the genre.

Ford’s humanist approach is all the more compelling in roles where he’s gone against Hollywood’s expectations and played the villain. Whether it’s been as the manipulative husband Dr. Norman Spencer in What Lies Beneath [Robert Zemeckis (b. 1951); 2000] or the obsessive patriarch Allie Fox in The Mosquito Coast [Peter Weir; 1986], what makes those moments of betrayal and disaster all the more memorable to audiences is everything that happens before. The scenes where his characters shift from their most charming, doting and morally upright to manipulative, controlling and abusive.

“I [perform] because it’s what I want to do; what I know how to do,” said Ford in a 1997 interview with Charlie Rose. “It’s where I feel the most engaged, challenged and useful. There’s nothing that I do that stimulates me more, scares me and engages me as much as making movies.”

Yet Ford has found just as much success on the small screen. Having previously guest-starred on TV shows such as Gunsmoke [1972, 1973; CBS], The Mod Squad [1968; ABC] and Ironside [1967; NBC], he has gained praise for his two most recent television projects, Yellowstone prequel 1923 [15 episodes, 2023, 2025; Paramount+] and, most notably, Shrinking [33 episodes, 2023, 2024, 2026; Apple TV+]. Both projects have allowed Ford to continue to demonstrate his range for making his characters feel as noble as any gunslinging lawman of the Wild West or as familiar as that one guy in the office who everybody knows.

As the Dutton family patriarch, Jacob, in 1923, Ford’s performances come with fire in his eyes and grit in his voice. But while his sheriff’s badge glints silver, the man underneath is shown to be desperate to keep his family’s livelihood and town from falling into chaos. On the other end of the spectrum, therapist Dr. Paul Rhoades [Ford’s character in Shrinking] is a role where Ford uses improvisation and embodies a gruff, “straight man” brand of humor.

Yet, it’s the tender moments, when his character is shown to enjoy spending time with his doctor-turned-girlfriend or battling with the increasing symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease that stay with viewers. Season two, episode 12 [24 December 2024], “The Last Thanksgiving,” is a certified fan favorite, and Ford’s work on the show earned him a first-time Screen Actors Guild Awards® nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series in 2025.

If good things get better over time, then Ford’s six decades of work prove the old adage is especially true with good storytelling. With experience and a willingness to explore and test one’s own boundaries comes a unique talent: an ability to let audiences be in awe about the best and worst embodiment of a person without judgment.

“I found a calling, a life in storytelling; an identity in pretending to be other people. The work I do with other actors is one of the great joys of my life. My career is built on their work, as well as the work of writers, directors and every single cast member — every crew member I’ve ever been on the set with. I’ve had incredible collaborators every step of the way, and being able to deliver the work we create together to an audience is an honor and a privilege. . . . [Through it] I’ve come to know myself,” said Ford.

THE HUMAN ABOVE ALL

As well-known as Ford is for his professional work, his life away from the limelight is as dynamic as his most heroic portrayals.

The urban legends surrounding his life as a carpenter are quite well-known to fans. Ford is just as famously known as a real-life pilot and has volunteered for many search-and-rescue efforts. Additionally, his early knowledge of the wilderness, stemming from both a love of nature and early years spent as a Boy Scout, has developed into tireless advocacy for environmental causes both in the United States and abroad, including his delivery of testimony before the United Nations Climate Summit for forest and ocean conservation. In 2018, Ford was a recipient of the SAG-AFTRA Foundation’s Artist Inspiration Award for what was then 25 years of service to environmental nonprofit Conservation International, as well as his longtime commitment as a member of the SAG-AFTRA Foundation’s Actors’ Council.  

In the end, it may be that Ford will be remembered as a person who chose for both his life and career the responsibility of advocacy, both for his fellow actors and the world.

Said SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin [b. 1971] of the Life Achievement Award honoree, “Harrison Ford is a singular presence in American life; an actor whose iconic characters have shaped world culture. His career has been endlessly exciting, always returning to his love of acting. We are honored to celebrate a legend whose impact on our craft is indelible.”

Nominated and voted on by the SAG-AFTRA National Honors and Tributes Committee, the Life Achievement Award is awarded annually at the Actor Awards. Considered the union’s highest honor, the award is bestowed to those whose professional and philanthropic contributions bring prestige to the craft of acting and attention to public service efforts. Ford is the awards’ 61st recipient.

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“HARRISON FORD & THE LIFE OF A WORKING ACTOR” 

[This “Actor to Actor” interview of Ford by Sean Astin appeared in the membership magazine SAG-AFTRA 15.2 (Spring 2026).]

The 61st Life Achievement Honoree Joins SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin for an Impactful Actor to Actor Interview

Harrison Ford believes in work. He prefers the term “working actor” over “icon” and attests to the power of “putting the work in” in order to be a professional. The result of Ford’s dedication to craft has been his legacy as a performer exalted in the profession. Following the announcement that he was selected to be the 61st SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Award honoree, Ford sat down with SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin for an Actor to Actor interview. The following is an abridged version of their conversation that took place on Feb. 4.

SEAN ASTIN: Mr. Ford, Welcome to the SAG-AFTRA headquarters. And congratulations on being this year’s recipient of the Life Achievement Award.

HARRISON FORD: Thank you very much.

ASTIN: I looked up the word “iconic.” [That was] my first thought when they told me they wanted to see if you would accept this award. I thought, “Well he’s iconic.” Can you live with the word “iconic”?

FORD: No, I’d really rather live with the words “working actor.”

ASTIN: So a lot of our performers are in the audition process. It’s all about auditioning on videotape from home — the self tape. And it’s turned into a great convenience. And it makes me think about the contract time; when you’re doing all those auditions under contract.

FORD: Well, the best thing about being under contract is they never put me up for anything I had to audition for.

ASTIN: So that’s it? You’re in the rotation and you just . . .

FORD: Well, because my part often was nothing more than, “Mr. Jones? Paging Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones?” I was under contract at Columbia Pictures for seven years. The first thing they put me in, I was able to remember all the lines of the character I played: a bellboy [Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, 1966; uncredited]. And I was summoned to the office of the executive of Columbia Pictures that was in charge of the new talent program. He said, “You’re never gonna make it in this business.” And this is on the basis of delivering a telegram. And he said, “Let me tell you a story.” He said, “The first time Tony Curtis was ever in a movie, he delivered a bag of groceries. You took one look at that guy and you say, ‘That’s a movie star.’” I leaned across the desk and said, “I thought you were supposed to think that that was a grocery delivery boy.” He said, “Get the eff out of here.” And I did.

ASTIN: Some actors carry with them self-doubt.

FORD: I can carry both. I mean, I carried both. I carried a belief that I would learn to do this. But a belief also that it was a really hard space to own, and many people were not as successful as they wanted to be in the choice of that as a career. But I was not easily dissuaded. Partially, because I thought that it would take time, and that I was learning . . . To be frank, it was a difficult time in my life. I had kids, and I was struggling with money. But it was a job and I was glad to have it.

ASTIN: I remember Witness. When it came out, I was younger and thinking “Oh, that’s what an actor [does]. You were committed to being an actor. That meant something to me.”

FORD: Well, having seen what you’ve done, I appreciate that very much.

ASTIN: I was in a film trilogy [The Ring Trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003)] . . . There were a thousand moments where the director Peter Jackson would talk about the audience. “This is what I want the audience to be feeling. This is what the audience is thinking.” And I never thought of it like that. I wonder, has that ever been a part of your . . .

FORD: Oh, yeah. I think I’m always aware of the audience and wanting to bring them along. I want to create an experience for them . . . I work for them. That’s my job. And I think about the clarity of what we’re doing. I think about the energy of what we’re doing. I think about the emotion that we’re hoping to create.

ASTIN: You’ve talked [about loving] the process of filming. And I think a lot of actors, maybe many actors, don’t have those conversations with the filmmaker or the screenwriter.

FORD: Then that’s a shame. It’s often unfortunate that an actor comes into a project and doesn’t get a fair share of the director’s attention. Especially actors without a lot of experience.

ASTIN: Well, that’s — I was going to say counterintuitive. But I guess that makes sense that people without a lot of experience would need more of that.

FORD: Not necessarily need more advice, but I think it helps to feel that the director is somehow connected to what you’re doing. And it’s not just an incidental moment, but that it means something. That’s the only way you know what to do. It’s your concept of what the task is. When you say that line, what is the intention that the writer had in mind? What is it you’re hoping to elicit from the audience? What are you feeling? Are you really there? Or is the character really there in that moment? All of those things. It would help to know that the director notices what you’re doing . . . I remember coming in at the beginning of my career, coming onto a set and just feeling like I didn’t belong there. Not knowing how to behave really.

It is often the case that you develop a relationship with the director that is open and fruitful. And there are other cases where that’s not part of his skill necessarily, or not part of your skill, but you still have to attend to the story and your character’s responsibility in the telling of the story. So you can do without that, but it helps to have a little feeling of being accepted, being appreciated.

ASTIN: What I hear you describing is fundamental humility. There must be some kind of discipline you have to have not to abuse it. Or are you just saying, “Hey, no, this is this project. This is this story. These are these characters.”

FORD: You may have a different concept than the director. And you may persist in that concept, as I did with Ridley Scott in Blade Runner, famously. He had a very different idea of the character than what I felt was necessary to drive that character for myself. I had to believe that I was human. Ridley insisted on believing I was replicant, and that I would know it. I said, “I cannot communicate from that point, that place.” I would think that I’m human.

ASTIN: All right, so this is an award being presented to you by a union which you have been a member of [since 1966].

FORD: It’s such a hard thing to be a professional actor. From the very beginning, it’s impossible. And then there’s a crack, and you get a job, and you become a member of the union. And that’s a big, big deal because then you have the support of the union. You have insurance, you have someone speaking for you to the bosses . . . I would never say I was an actor until I was being paid for it. Now that’s my little twist of mind, because that doesn’t really make sense.

ASTIN: Sure it does. Professional. When you’re a professional, you're getting paid for it.

FORD: Yeah, but if you don’t have what an actor needs, you’re not an actor, even if you’re getting paid for it. I mean, it’s a spirit. It’s a diagnosis too. It’s a complicated thing. The thing is that you can’t do it alone. You have to be employed. You have to be in the company of other actors. You can do it for free, but you have to feel like it’s important. You have to feel committed to it and to make it real.

ASTIN: This is a big moment right now for the industry. The culture has changed and the business.

FORD: The business has changed remarkably. And we don’t have the support of movie theaters as much as we used to have. And that is a damn shame. That community experience produces positive effects in the culture. We’ve been disaggregated into serviceable economic units, but there’s not the general feeling of community that we used to have when movies had captured the zeitgeist. They were needed. And they were telling a story that was needed. And that story was a positive contribution to the culture.

ASTIN: It’s still possible. You’re doing it. You’re breaking through [and] reaching other people.

FORD: You’re not in a dark room with people that you don’t know and who you begin to know because you experience a common humanity. That’s a very powerful effect.

ASTIN: I grew to know you in many movies. [It’s an] absolute lifetime achievement for me to get to sit here and interview you.

FORD: Appreciate it.

ASTIN: Much love to you. From all the actors, thank you.