Who Is Tilly Norwood? Hollywood's Controversial AI-Generated Actress Explained

As you might be able to tell from the image above, Tilly Norwood is not a real person. "Tilly Norwood" is the nickname given to a photorealistic animated character conceived by the computerized image generation studio Xicoia. Xicoia, overseen by the small AI company Particle6, was founded specifically to generate videos of artificial "stars" and "actors," aiming to supplant live-action performers and invent a new generation of movie stars from scratch. Xicoia was announced in late September 2025, at the Zurich Film Festival, by Particle6's CEO  Eline Van der Velden. The idea is that Xicoia will be able to generate "actors" who can automatically provide "performances" for movies, voices for podcasts, content for YouTube, and provide their virtual bodies for video games. 

One might immediately be reminded of Griffin Mill's line from 1992's "The Player": "I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here." Griffin was being sarcastic, but if Hollywood has their way, theaters will be overrun with "actresses" like Tilly Norwood. 

Tilly, however, is meant to function like a Muppet. The character is an actress, and she will be licensed for use in whatever film can afford it, but "Tilly" also has a fictional backstory all her own, and a "personal life" that is being scripted and or generated by Xicoia's programmers. She is meant to have a life, both in movies and "off-screen" (even though she doesn't exist anywhere without a screen). And Xicoia's plan reaches further than Tilly Norwood. According to an article in Deadline, the company aims to create a few dozen such AI characters. 

Van der Velden said: "We believe the next generation of cultural icons will be synthetic – stars that never tire, never age, and can interact with fans."

Controversy erupted over Tilly's unveiling, of course.

According to a secondary article in Deadline, Van der Velden had inside knowledge of the future of AI in Hollywood filmmaking. She said that many studios, despite the SAG/AFTRA strike of 2023, were still investing in automated image generators, hoping to replace actors with digital avatars in the near future. Van de Velden noted that earlier in 2025, no one was interested in renting out an AI "actress," but only a few months later, everyone was interested. Now this "Tilly" figure is possibly going to be represented by a talent agency, as if it were an actual person. In Van der Valden's words: 

"We were in a lot of boardrooms around February time, and everyone was like, 'No, this is nothing. It's not going to happen'. Then, by May, people were like, 'We need to do something with you guys.' When we first launched Tilly, people were like, 'What's that?,' and now we're going to be announcing which agency is going to be representing her in the next few months."

She also said that studios were already extensively using AI generators for various projects, but have been keeping it on the down-low because the technology is so staggeringly unpopular. 

Indeed, only two days after saying that "Tilly" had "signed" with a talent agency, Van der Velden had to backpedal a little bit in a tertiary Deadline report. It's worth noting that no agency has "signed" Tilly. That's impossible, as Tilly has no hands to sign papers. Indeed, the announcement that a talent agency would want to sign a contract with a fictional character seems to have been made only to gin up publicity for Xicoia's tech. If anything, a studio would hire the image-generation firm, not sign a contract with a cartoon character. 

Van der Velden heard the outcry over Tilly Norwood and had to walk back some of the anthropomorphizing she had done in reference to the character. She said: 

"To those who have expressed anger over the creation of my AI character, Tilly Norwood, she is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work – a piece of art. Like many forms of art before her, she sparks conversation, and that in itself shows the power of creativity." 

As for "those who have expressed anger," they are legion. On a recent episode of "The View," as covered by EW, Whoopi Goldberg expressed disgust over the weird fakeness of Tilly Norwood, saying that one can always, always tell the difference between a real actor and an animated one. Goldberg also noted Van der Velden's comments that Tilly was a "creative work," noting that actors and audiences had already openly gone on strike against/boycotted studios over threats of using AI machines. She chuckled sardonically over the comment that AI performances could be seen as a genre.

Other professional human actors chimed in on social media, according to a report by No Film School. Melissa Barrera wrote on her Instagram account that she hopes "all actors repped by the agent that does this, drop their a**. How gross, read the room." Actress and author Mara Wilson noted that the "Tilly Norwood" character was extrapolated from hundreds of other actresses, and that it would make more logical sense to, you know, hire one of them instead. Lukas Gage satirized the situation by saying that he had already worked with "Tilly Norwood," and that she was very unprofessional, never hitting her marks and forgetting her lines. 

AI image generation technology has created a sizable investment bubble, and studios still seem to be going ham with it, even as the public increasingly hates it. When the bubble bursts, Tilly will die. She will not have a funeral. She's not real.