European Central: Tilly Norwood, Film’s Newest Talent, Isn’t Real. But Her Impact on European Filmmakers Could Be

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At the annual Zurich Film Festival in Switzerland, filmmakers showed off their newest projects, audiences gave their famously long standing ovations, and awards were handed out to the most promising new films. But the biggest development from the eleven-day festival was a single panel with Dutch comedian, writer, and actress Eline Van der Velden.

In it, Van der Velden revealed that her AI talent studio, Xicoia, was in talks with many talent agents who wanted to sign their studio’s first AI actress, Tilly Norwood. “We want Tilly to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman,” Van der Velden said in an interview with Broadcast International. During a panel discussion at the festival, Van der Velden stated that audiences “care about the story — not whether the star has a pulse … the age of synthetic actors isn’t ‘coming’ — it’s here.”

Audiences, along with actors and producers, seemed to disagree. The announcement sparked both immediate alarm and opportunity for the media and entertainment world, which has long been pushing for protections against AI overtaking living actors. Whether or not this is a new age of film-making, this seismic change will shake up the entire industry and may be a hidden boon for European filmmakers looking for a new opportunity. 

A New Talent In Town

Tilly Norwood isn’t just an AI face. The goal is for AI characters like Norwood to have complete backstories, distinct voices, and fully realized personalities. Van der Velden’s AI production company, Particle6, is hoping this will create as realistic an avatar as possible, one that can go off-script and even interact with fans. 

To date, Norwood is the only publicly released AI actor and has only starred in a single project, a two-minute YouTube sketch called AI Commissioner. The company, however, reportedly plans to use its avatar personality engine DeepFame to create upwards of 40 characters like Norwood. 

At the Zurich film festival, Van der Velden also revealed that her company was negotiating with talent agents in February who hadn’t bought into the AI actor promise, but that by May, their tune had changed. For the moment, Van der Velden believes that AI is a “creation, a piece of art,” and that it's “not a substitute for human craft, but a new paintbrush — like animation, puppetry, or CGI.” 

However, on top of creating new actors, the new AI technology has opened the door wider for companies to have stars appear as their younger versions, or for reviving actors who have passed away. In this case, that line of replacing actors with AI could be very easily crossed. 

All of this has raised alarms across the industry. A host of big names, including Emily Blunt and Sean Astin, the president of the American actors’ union SAG-AFTRA, have condemned the unveiling of Norwood and have vowed to address the issue with agents. However, while there may truly be talent agents who seem to be slowly embracing AI actors, other talent agencies like Gersh and WME have said that they won’t be the agencies to embrace AI actors.  

The Logistics Of An AI Actress

There are many logistical questions to be answered when it comes to AI actors. Firstly, what are the datasets used to train AI, and do they use real, human performances as training data with permission? Like all AI learning models, the programs need an immense amount of data in order to be sufficiently complex. 

But much of that data is often scrubbed off the internet, as the internet contains such an immense wealth of diverse data that is an irresistible treasure trove of inputs to train AI programs. Web crawlers, which travel from website to website copying every ounce of data, are often used to compile this training data for AI, and the programs for AI actors are no different. So if companies can create life-like AI actors, there is a legal question of how much of the AI training amounts to plagiarism of other actors’ performances.

Secondly, would AI actors be entitled to financial compensation? This is a question that has emerged in the music industry, where AI-generated artists are pulling in so many streams that they are charting on Billboard. If they are entitled to royalties, then the same case could be made for AI actors, leading to the actors being considered, to an extent, people. 

This leads into a final logistical question: Would the actors be intellectual property, or would they be entitled to a degree of legal personhood, like some corporations? Some legal analyses lean towards the former, but that also has downstream effects. 

A lot of the movie industry, and other industries like gaming and literature, are increasingly dominated by the intellectual property (IP) market. The global market size for IP was $12.5 billion in 2023, and could bloom to around $22.9 billion by 2032. 

But in the movie and TV industry especially, IP represents massive long-term earning potential in the form of reboots, sequels, merchandise, theme parks, and streaming and licensing deals. Old IPs, like the “Bridgerton” romance book series and the comic series “The Boys” are just a pair of the most watched streaming originals in 2024, generating massive revenues.

Reportedly, Xicoia’s vision was to create essentially an “evolving digital IP”, with crossovers and fandom expansion. With the previous success of evolving IP’s like Netflix’s recommendation algorithm and expanded universes like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there is a lot of potential for these new AI actors to generate a lot of money.

A Massive Disruption In Filmmaking Could Be A Boon

This new potential, however, may not flow to where most filmmaking money is made: Hollywood, the Mecca of global movie-making. In fact, Hollywood still has not recovered its domestic revenue since the COVID-19 pandemic, while shoot days declined 22% over the first quarter of 2025, and the average occupancy rates for the majority of stages were 63% in 2024, a 6% drop from the previous year.

Additionally, mergers and acquisitions across Hollywood, like the Skydance and Paramount merger, are showcasing just how much American film studios are struggling. This means that the door is open for other global studios to step in, and the use of AI actors may be a way for other studios to catch up, for better or for worse. 

Xicoia is based in London, but there are multiple burgeoning filmmaking industries across Europe. For example, German producers have struggled over the years, as theater admissions have fallen 5.8% this year compared to last, and domestic titles occupied a mere 20.6% share of the market, a 3.7% drop. But the last German government approved a new version of the country’s film funding law, while cutting many of the diversity, gender equality, inclusion, and anti-discrimination standards. 

The downsides of those cuts notwithstanding, this is a huge lifeline for the German film industry, which relies heavily on tax subsidies. With AI actors costing a fraction of what human actors cost, as well as not being able to unionize, these burgeoning industries can further catch up to the big-name Western film studios’ financial advantage by using them.

Already, rising costs in the U.S. and disruption from strikes and wildfires have pushed many filmmakers to Central Europe, where countries like Hungary, Germany, and the Czech Republic are leaning on that foreign talent to grow their own industries. In fact, those three countries accounted for over $1 billion in production spending in 2024, in large part due to the generous film tax rebates of these nations, in addition to experienced crews and growing infrastructure.

AI actors like Tilly Norwood likely won’t single-handedly tip the scales towards a new European  “Hollywood”. But while they still have many logistical hurdles to overcome and the pushback is still widespread, if media companies and talent agencies are truly itching for a cheaper source of talent with a huge monetary IP upside, then the burgeoning European film market may have a new paintbrush with which it can craft a new future for itself.