Tuesday, September 30, 2025 |
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Who is Tilly Norwood? If your guess is a hotshot rising actress, you're right—sort of. Norwood is an AI-generated character created by London-based AI studio Particle6. She looks like an amalgamation of a whole bunch of celebrity actresses, has an Instagram page, and has already starred in a commercial. But here's the real dystopian rub: The company's founder claims that Norwood has signed with a talent agency. Hollywood, understandably, is furious. Everyone from flesh-and-blood actors to SAG-AFTRA have denounced Norwood and Particle6's seeming designs to make her the first AI A-lister. Esquire's Eric Francisco asks—and answers—all of your biggest questions below. – Brady Langmann, senior entertainment editor Plus: |
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Tilly Norwood is the talk of Tinseltown. Here's where she came from, why everyone in Hollywood is furious, and what she might do next. |
At the Zurich Film Festival last week, London-based AI studio Particle6 announced the launch of a new company, Xicocia, which Deadline describes as an "AI talent studio designed to create, manage, and monetize" its stable of digital characters. The launch unveiled Particle6's first AI-generated "actress": Tilly Norwood, a 20-something brunette whose defining personality trait seems to be "iced coffee." To be clear: Tilly Norwood is not real. She is a digital figurine, the end result of a million ones and zeroes. She lives in a hard drive, not rain-soaked London as seen in her AI-overrun Instagram. But she is now all over Particle6's website, which suggests how much the company's AI endeavors hinge on Tilly as a de facto mascot. On September 27, Deadline reported that an unnamed talent agency signed on Tilly Norwood as a "client." With AI slop overwhelming the Internet and questions of labor, economics, and the diminished importance of human perspective in art wrapped up in the disruption, the Tilly Norwood case encapsulates so much of the resentment artists—and actors in particular—have toward the dizzying rush to an increasingly AI-fascinated world. |
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Glen Powell had a secret. The actor teamed up with screenwriter-producer Michael Waldron to adapt Eli Manning's football-world-famous "Chad Powers" prank—in which the retired quarterback put on a disguise for a Penn State football tryout—into a TV show. The Waldron–Powell duo was hardly the first team to attempt to morph a sketch into a hit TV series, but things were actually ... going ... pretty well? The two landed on a brilliant premise. The hilarious Hulu series, which debuts its first two episodes today, follows Russ Holliday (Powell), a blue-chip college quarterback who crashes out during a game on live TV. Inspired by the great Mrs. Doubtfire, he stages a comeback—disguising himself as the country-bumpkin goofball Chad Powers. Waldron and Powell figured out everything about Chad—the nose, the hair, those chipmunk cheeks—but they had yet to land on his voice. Powell hid Chad's drawl from the crew. As Waldron remembers, Powell finally busted out his voice at a table reading with a whole lot of 20th Century Fox and Hulu executives in the room. It's a delicious cocktail of Bobby Boucher and Forrest Gump, imbued with maximum weirdo energy from Powell. "It's so funny because it really feels like something Russ is making up on the fly," Waldron tells me. "By the end, there's such a sweetness to it. Glen and I are really close. Unfortunately, now it's weird to me when I hear Glen Powell's voice come out of his mouth. Because I'm like, 'This is who you're meant to be.'" |
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The narrative that's starting to form in the wake of the 2025 Ryder Cup is the difference in the American and European programs. Keegan Bradley willingly (and, in my book, unfairly) shouldered most of the blame post-loss, talking about his player pairings, preparation, and course design. I'd say it's more structural. The European model has always prioritized stability, but now there's relentless focus on the details that I think mimics the Moneyball you see all over the continent's soccer leagues. It's starting to widen the gap; Europe has won nine of the 12 Ryder Cups played this century. And I think Europe's Loro Piana uniforms are the perfect metaphor for what you're seeing on the course. No, I'm not being facetious, though I may—as pretty much everyone at this magazine can be guilty of—think about clothes too much. But if you're talking about the chasm in institutional preparation that's opening up in this competition, go as deep as you can. The pretournament promotional work shows just how obsessive the European group and its captain, Luke Donald, are about these uniforms. | |
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