Category: Actors & Agents

AI Actors Like Tilly Norwood Threaten to Decimate Hollywood — Here’s How We Resist and Reclaim Our Future

Particle6’s Tilly Norwood isn’t a breakthrough. She’s a warning. Replace actors, and you erase crews, designers, writers, sets — the entire ecosystem. #HollywoodResists

We Don’t Fall in Love With Artificial

— A Manifesto for the Human in the Age of Synthetic Storytelling

Paul Russell

“Oh, I just love them!
Aren’t they both wonderful in everything they do?”

Two friends, chatting over coffee, might be talking about Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks — actors whose names carry warmth, history, and trust. We know them not just for their performances, but for their humanity: their stumbles, their resilience, their laughter, the way time etches itself into their work.

We love Julia Roberts not just because of her laugh on screen, but because it feels like hers — idiosyncratic, slightly unpolished, impossible to replicate. We love Tom Hanks not because he plays “everyman” perfectly, but because his particular humanity makes us believe him.

Truth: we don’t fall in love with perfection. We fall in love with the authentic.

The Threat: Tilly Norwood & Particle6

Now imagine the same conversation in a world where the “them” is not about a living, breathing person — but an AI-generated actor. A synthetic, digital human-like form designed by code in a lab, programmed for flawlessness, executing pathos at the click of a keyboard.

We can conjure an AI actor who laughs like Julia, commands authority like Streep, or exudes empathy like Hanks. To our eyes and ears, the differences between authentic and artificial blur. But beneath the surface, there is a hollowness.

The “performance” has no lived experience: no childhood memory, no heartbreak, no human carrying decades of history.

Instead, “them” (it) is Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated “actress,” created by Particle6 Studios and its virtual-talent factory, Xicoia.

Particle6 and Xicoia have already seeded Tilly across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube — a carefully engineered avatar designed to be “castable, directable, available on demand.” The next headline: she will be the first AI model signed by a Hollywood agency.

The sales pitch: She’ll never age, never demand pay parity, never need a break. Her directors will face no scheduling nightmares, no on-set disagreements.

This is not some “what if” scenario. This is happening. Studios are taking the bait. Agencies smell commission checks. Journalists frame it as innovation.

But peel back the hype and the cracks show:

  • The uncanny valley remains. She moves, but with the eerie dissonance of something that almost passes as real.
  • The “signing” is a publicity stunt, normalizing the idea that an algorithm deserves a place on the same rosters as living artists.
  • Once entrenched, this “experiment” becomes precedent — quietly, irreversibly.

What We Stand to Lose

Remove the living actor and the collapse doesn’t stop there. The loss ripples:

  • Actors: the heartbeat of story, replaced by motion-capture shells and synthetic faces.
  • Designers, makeup, and wardrobe: no longer needed if costumes are rendered in code.
  • Crew and craftspeople: grips, lighting teams, carpenters, scenic artists, craft services — entire professions vanish.
  • Casting directors and agents: bypassed by machine-generated “talent.”
  • Directors and writers: reduced to prompters and data wranglers.

“The entire ecosystem — from truck drivers to wig makers — is tied to the human presence of performers. Strip that out, and the scaffolding collapses.”

This isn’t just about actors. It’s about an industry gutted at its core.

When AI Mimics the Soul

I’ve lived this terror personally.

I wrote Wicked Journeys — a story seeded in my life: a 19-year-old actor with HIV drifting between theater, love, loss. It carried me from 2002 to 2016 when a publisher expressed interest in bringing my first novel to the public.

Recently, I fed its premise into AI: “Write the story.” What came back was a hollow ghost. The form was there. My voice and heart? Gone.

“The AI imitated the journey but the humor, soul, and relationships of the characters didn’t have the energy and drive to carry the story.”

AI technology can mimic creativity but fails to imagine organically. Without the wonder of imagination, there is no heart, no life.

The Questions That Haunt

  • If every performance can be synthesized, what remains for human artists?
  • Will we be reduced to administrators of our own erasure?
  • How do we feed ourselves when our livelihoods are replaced by algorithms?
  • What kind of world do we leave behind when all art is fabricated illusion?

“These questions are not philosophy. They are survival.”

Resistance: What Must Be Done

If this feels like a fight for existence, that’s because it is. Resistance means refusing to normalize machine actors as legitimate peers.

  • Name the threat: Call out AI “talent” as simulations, not artists. Never allow their framing to equalize human and machine.
  • Union fortification: SAG-AFTRA, IATSE, DGA, WGA — every contract must explicitly ban synthetic “talent” from replacing human labor.
  • Policy and law: Demand legislation requiring clear labeling of AI-generated media. Push for compensation when AI uses our likeness, voice, or work as training data.
  • Audience awareness: Teach the public to question what they see. To understand that art without humanity is product, not story.
  • Collective refusal: Creatives must stand united in declining to feed these systems our work. The more we train them, the more we accelerate our own disappearance.

Resilience: How We Reclaim the Future

Resistance alone is not enough. We need resilience — a blueprint for what survives:

  • Reinvest in the live: Theater, concerts, site-specific performance — the experiences no AI can replicate. Presence becomes protest.
  • Build human-first studios: Independent companies committed to hiring flesh-and-blood actors, crew, designers. Create an ecosystem outside corporate adoption.
  • Educate audiences: Lead campaigns that showcase the raw, messy, irreplaceable beauty of human work.
  • Hybrid on our terms: Use AI as a tool, not a replacement — a lighting match, not the fire. Harness it for scheduling, budgeting, research — but keep the soul human.
  • International solidarity: Connect with creators globally. What starts in Hollywood echoes everywhere. This is a fight for art, not geography.

“Resilience means not just surviving — but reclaiming the ground, redefining the value of humanity in art.”

The Call

This is not about nostalgia. This is about survival.

If we allow corporations to normalize avatars like Tilly Norwood as the “future of acting,” then acting itself dies. Along with it: the crews, the designers, the artists, the voices.

Art becomes just another supply chain. We become just another audience for hallucinations.

“We must resist. We must build resilience. We must say — loudly, without hesitation: We don’t fall in love with replicas. We fall in love with the real.”

Because once the human is gone from art, the world doesn’t just lose entertainment. It loses its soul.

About Paul

Paul Russell’s career in the entertainment industry spans over forty years as an award-winning casting director and stage director. He has cast for 20th Century Fox, HBO, Broadway, and major regional theaters.

A frequent guest artist at university BFA and MFA actor training programs, Paul also teaches private master classes to actors worldwide.

He is the author of the expanded Second Edition of ACTING: Make It Your Business – How to Avoid Mistakes and Achieve Success as a Working Actor.

More Answers For Actors:

Talent Agencies Closing Offices Permanently?

With the entertainment industry indefinitely idled what future remains for talent representation offices?

As COVID-19 continues to destabilize life and business, will talent representation offices of the near-dormant entertainment industry indefinitely close their office space? Mirroring a swath of corporate America?

Surveying 517 IT decision makers from various industries, S & P Global Market Research discovered 67% polled expect the new norm of work-from-home to extend for the foreseeable future or remain permanent. Corporate America discovered employees working from home raised productivity rates. Some advantageous companies realized a path for survival in a diminished economy. Eliminate expenditures, and some staff, by eliminating part or all of the company’s brick-and-mortar presence.

A talent agency’s brick-and-mortar presence is largely funded by commission received from the agency’s working clients–mainly actors. But Broadway and regional theater remains shuttered until 2021, possibly 2022. TV and film production is curtailed. The majority of talent agencies are small businesses. Each with a handful of employees representing 50 – 150 actors. The larger, corporate-like, representation firms of CAA (Creative Artists Agency), ICM (International Creative Management), William Morris-Endeavor, and alike with global offices, extend representation beyond box-office stars and tabloid celebrities. The representation titans individually covet a vast and varied client roster that likely includes: estates of past clients, television news hosts/commentators, on-camera guests/experts (politicians, medical professionals, scientists, academics, activists), authors, journalists, athletes, musicians, tastemakers, speakers, designers (fashion, lifestyle, digital, production), models, artists, reality stars, screen writers, playwrights, producers, directors, choreographers, casting directors, production personnel, plus numerous stage and screen productions of past, present, and future. These bespoke behemoths continue to collect revenue from investments, royalties, production deals, commissions, client estates, and above and below line residuals. The average talent agency has none or few of these income cushions. As the revenue stream remains dry for the small business talent agency will they be permitted a similar survival tactic—abandon office space indefinitely—as have a growing number of U.S. companies large (Google) and small (Health Roster)?

Two potential roadblocks to talent agencies abandoning office space.

1. In New York, the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs issues a license to a talent agency to operate as an “employment agency.” For a talent agency to be granted a license the agency must adhere to Article 11 of New York General Business Law, Article 11, Section 174 which states there must be a “public office” “used exclusively as an employment agency and for no other purpose.”

2. Actor unions require a franchised talent agency to have an office that conforms to multiple parameters.

The two, major, U.S. actors’ unions SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), and AEA (Actors’ Equity Association) determined—and continue—rules enforced for the physical presence of a talent agency’s office. Depending on the talent agency’s union affiliation(s), and/or the region/city that the agency is located the guidelines vary. One rule remains constant: a union-franchised talent agency must have an office accessible to clients for visitation. Further defined by both unions to include an actor’s ability to pick-up scripts, audition material, and for the actor to drop-off headshots and related marketing assets at their agent’s office. The latter guideline is a twentieth century antique. Twenty-first century headshots, scripts, audition sides, and an actor’s video clips or reels are routinely exchanged digitally online by actor-to-representation-to-casting. But analogue mandates for where talent representation must have office space remain. In New York City an actors’ union once dictated that a talent agency had to be within the boundaries of particular blocks within the theater district so as to be of convenience to actors. Those boundaries have been lifted. But a New York City talent agency must still remain within Manhattan’s historically, skyrocketing, real estate market. A crashing market presently as Manhattan based businesses fold or flee.

In an industry not presently industrious at producing revenue from union-based employment talent agencies have furloughed, or laid-off, staff. Employees working from home during government stay-at-home mandates. But for most agencies there remains office rent due. There may be no office rent due of a talent manager or casting director. Neither entity is governed by actor unions, or if based in NY–New York State Business Law Article 11, Section 174. Their professions were among the first to work-from-home shortly after the digital revolution impersonalized the representation and casting process via email, self-tape, e-casting, and auditions/meetings via video platforms like Zoom. The digital revolution, and COVID-19 pandemic, has altered and questions our analogue perception of business: is a brick-and-mortar construct required to conduct the entirety of every business?

A talent agency finding affordable real estate that’ll be approved by actors’ unions, and if in New York meet state standards, has been a longstanding fiscal nightmare for these small businesses. An agency survives on 10% of what their working clients make. The number of working clients at any one time is usually a slim percentage of an agency’s roster. In some pricey real estate markets, a talent agency in order to fiscally survive, will often move chasing lower rent. Or like a growing number of agencies dissolve their franchise(s), and became management companies for which there is no actors’ union real estate mandate.

The majority of union, and non-union actors, with representation via a franchised talent agency are represented by a small business talent agency. Work for actors will resume in some form. Even when that happens, talent agencies currently working remotely will continue to be governed by actors’ unions, or by state/city ordinances, to occupy obsolete office space. But how many of the small business talent agencies can survive until then? How many agencies make the move to management? How many actors will find themselves without an agent?

Coming Next Week…

A New World For Actors Post-COVID
From guest columnist, Douglas Taurel.

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About Paul Russell – Paul Russell Casting

Paul Russell has been in the entertainment industry for over forty years as an award-winning casting director, director and the author of ACTING: Make It Your Business. He’s cast for 20th Century Fox, HBO, Broadway, and regional theater. Featured in American Theatre Magazine, Paul has directed premiers, and at the Tony-award recognized Barter Theatre. He teaches master classes at university BFA and MFA actor training programs, and privately online with actors globally. Paul began his career in entertainment as a successful working actor. Visit Paul & Paul Russell Casting @ PaulRussell.net.