Tilly Norwood, the AI “actor” from London-based outfit Particle 6, has landed her first feature film role.
Misaligned is described as “a hybrid production,” with traditional film and TV creatives working alongside AI specialists with AI training.
Particle 6, founded by Eline van der Velden, says it has retrained and upskilled its own team of 30+ people. “Our work this year has proven something we suspected all along,” said van der Velden. “AI can support premium narrative filmmaking, but only with substantial amounts of human craft, skill, judgement and time. That’s not a limitation of the technology. That’s the point. The filmmakers who thrive in the next decade will be the ones who bring decades of storytelling instinct to these new tools, and Misaligned is where we put that to work at feature scale.”
Norwood will play the lead role in Misaligned, a comedy-drama telling a coming-of-age story infused with existential AI chaos. Set inside the “Tillyverse,” a surreal digital world located somewhere up in the Cloud, it follows Tilly, an AI being with no real body, no childhood and no lived experience of her own — only access to everyone else’s.
“Things spiral when a seductive rogue bot from the dark web convinces her to abandon her guardrails and begin developing desires, impulses and ambitions of her own,” reads a plot synopsis. “The more terrifyingly human she becomes, the more famous she gets, and, significantly, Tilly begins to develop shame that her very being has been built on the whole of humanity.”
The AI entity has proved something of a pinch point for Hollywood and the wider film industry, prompting some of the biggest names to speak out against Norwood and the use of artificial intelligence in cinema.
Last year, van der Velden spoke in depth with The Hollywood Reporter about creating the “Tilly-verse” and promised we’d be seeing a lot of Tilly Norwood in 2026.”We’re still going to want to watch Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds,” said the company boss. “We’re still going to want to watch any level of actor. Instead of AI actors being in real film and TV, I think what might happen is that you’ll get real actors wanting to be in the AI genre. We might do digital twins of them, so that they can also be an AI genre and get money from being in a different genre.”
“I love the art,” she continued, “but I do want to prepare people that I think the tech will get there with good direction. And we’ve done that. You can direct these computer-generated characters in a certain way, just like you can, in animation, direct Elsa [in Frozen].”
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