Watching The Materialists the other day, my sister did her usual thing of googling relentlessly throughout the film and sharing what she found. “Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal are both a decade older than their characters,” she pointed out. I wasn’t shocked. But I was surprised to subsequently hear that Dakota Johnson is thirty-five, roughly the age of her character Lucy. That felt like a step forward in Hollywood terms, where twenty-six-year-olds routinely play mothers to three children or Robert Downey Jr.’s wife.
That flicker of hope dimmed quickly when I learned about Hollywood’s newest star: Tilly Norwood. A pretty brunette with big eyes and pouty lips, Norwood resembles Gal Gadot, Vanessa Hudgens, Ana de Armas — a parade of “sexy girl next door” types. This isn’t accidental. Norwood was intentionally designed to be all of this and more. Because Norwood is not human, she is an AI actress.
Norwood is the first creation from the newly launched AI talent studio Xicoia, spun off from Eline Van der Velden’s Particle6. Van der Velden revealed agents had been circling the character and that an agency announcement was imminent.
But the reaction has been far from universally positive. “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,” Van der Velden wrote on Instagram. “Like many forms of art before her, she sparks conversation, and that itself shows the power of creativity.”
Born this way… and still getting better with age.
Yet in July, speaking to Broadcast International, Van der Velden said she wanted Norwood “to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman.”
Age is already a loaded subject in Hollywood, where actresses are ushered into obsolescence the moment they enter the “MILF” category. Most female roles are canonically played by actresses far younger than their characters.
In The Hours (2002), Nicole Kidman, then in her 30s, played Virginia Woolf in her late 40s, relying heavily on makeup. Scarlett Johansson was just 18 in Lost in Translation, playing a character far beyond her years. And eighteen-year-old Keira Knightley in Love Actually played a newly married woman and the object of her husband’s best friend’s affections.
Meanwhile, men age on-screen with ease. Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and George Clooney have played romantic leads well into their 50s.
Tilly Norwood represents the ultimate iteration of this trend: an actress who will never age. She fixes Hollywood’s tricky admission that women cannot stay young forever. Too many women measure themselves against their eighteen-year-old selves, regardless of biology, life changes and the physical markers of lived experience. Norwood will cement the anti-ageing ideal because she is that ideal. With her flawless skin, wide eyes, and porcelain complexion, Norwood embodies Hollywood’s fantasy of eternal youth. This look mirrors the sexualised, curated youthfulness trending on OnlyFans and across influencer culture.
Are we entering a world where human actors become obsolete in favour of curated, “perfect” digital faces? Many actresses fear losing their jobs to AI, with stars like Emily Blunt, Mara Wilson and Melissa Barrera speaking out against Norwood. But her impact will go deeper. Just as drugs like Ozempic raise the question “Why can’t you be skinny forever?”, AI actors ask: “Why can’t you look good forever?”
Let women age.
Hanna Thomas Uose’s novel, Who Wants to Live Forever, imagines a drug named Yareta that halts ageing — a concept that asks profound questions about ambition, love, parenthood and mortality. Will life become more precious or reckless if it lasts forever? Will we start to revere the rarity of ageing features or shun them from society completely?
At its core, our fear of ageing is a fear of time — of death. But as someone who has faced severe depression and suicidal thoughts, and lost my father in his early sixties, I don’t fear death. I fear life and the filling of it. I refuse to dread my thirtieth birthday next year or resent the stretch marks that accompany the scars on my thighs; they’re the proof of a life lived.
Norwood doesn’t just challenge Hollywood; she challenges every woman who’s ever felt pressured to ‘stay young’ in an Instagram world.
The danger of Norwood is the same as that of Ozempic, filters, and cosmetic perfection: they amplify pressure on women to conform to digital ideals. If natural ageing disappears from screens, ageing itself becomes the anomaly. If I have children one day, I hope they’ll see my ageing features for longer than I got to see my father’s, and I hope they’ll see those features on their TV screens as well. Because ageing is not failure. It’s the ultimate story worth telling.
If Hollywood erases natural ageing, what does that say about our culture’s respect for time, life and lived experience? Perhaps Tilly Norwood isn’t just the future of cinema, she’s a warning, one we need now more than ever.
