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 posed 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 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.

[(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) was an 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 an 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]. 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 — 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 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.  On both the print and online versions of the above 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 Rick On Theater, but they are available on the paper’s website.

[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).]