Given that she has appeared only fleetingly in a brief comedy sketch, backlash to AI actor Tilly Norwood has been swift and fulsome. The people, the industry and the critics spoke with united voice, all of them basically retching.
Actors were especially fast out of the gate to condemn a concept that is – obviously – depressing, dystopian and (if the tech behind it has ripped off real-life faces) dodgy. It is also plain shonky: my colleague Stuart Heritage has said perhaps all there needs to be said about Tilly’s indeterminate dentistry, but there are clearly teething problems here that mean she’s far from ready for her closeup.
Still, on Tuesday US union Sag-Aftra – a whoppingly powerful organisation – hit back at this little skit that screened at a conference in Zurich by saying it believed creativity was, “and should remain, human-centred. The union is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics”.
Natasha Lyonne and Emily Blunt urged agencies not to sign the likes of Tilly to their books. “Deeply misguided and totally disturbed,” said Lyonne. “Not the way. Not the vibe.” Blunt meanwhile, told a Variety podcast: “Good Lord, we’re screwed. That is really, really scary … Please stop taking away our human connection.”
To which one can only reply: hear, hear! And also: eh? Because such cheerleading for naturalism can feel increasingly iffy. Actors may say they are committed to human connection and emotional truth telling. They may indeed believe that they are. Yet both the movies and the decisions many of them make tell a different story.
This season, at least four female actors, all A-list, none older than early 40s, appear to have had cosmetic work done on their face that renders what many of us might consider their greatest asset devalued, or at least changed, for ever.
Cheeks have been smoothed, jaws tightened and lips plumped. Looks are now standardised, homogenised, blandified – no CGI or AI necessary!
None have confirmed such work, and any such procedures are of course their own business. Except that that business is plausibly portraying everyday people, while trading on the affection and association audiences have fostered for them over a number of years in which they looked … different.
The other week I watched an intense new drama starring one of these actors and was totally thrown by these abrupt changes to her face: subtle, yet still substantial enough to be unsettling.
In the past, that face was one of the aspects of her appeal that meant I was happy to watch her reel off any old junk – and frequently had. Instead, I spent two hours feeling distanced, mournful and faintly frightened: not feelings that encourage submission to a fiction.
Presumably the pressures on female actors to fight the passing of time are considerable enough to mean many make this kind of leap – for which, my sympathies. Yet changing your face to try to reject the inevitable does make protestations of commitment to gritty reality harder to swallow.
It’s not just the women, of course: theirs is simply the most visible incongruity. Sometimes the entire entertainment climate feels like a vacuum of vanity. We are living in a golden age of self-absorbed cinema, in which many of the key movies of the season serve to feed the egos of their leads rather than cater for the audience.
Jay Kelly stars George Clooney as a Clooney-esque movie icon, and is filled with commentary on the pain and glory of superstardom. Other movies which may strike the deepest chord with those who have a personal publicist include Is This Thing On?, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, The Smashing Machine and Song Sung Blue – the latter three further fruits of Hollywood’s insatiable appetite for entertainment biopics.
Elsewhere we have Die, My Love the definition of an actors’ movie, in which Jennifer Lawrence (particularly) and Robert Pattinson (a bit) are allowed every opportunity to chew scenery while looking really hot, as well as Daniel Day-Lewis’s self-scripted comeback, Anemone, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s adorably scrappy dad in One Battle After Another.
Some of these are nonetheless good movies. Some, even, are superb. But if actors want to not alienate audiences, to help illuminate life as most people experience it, they might consider broadening the scope of their scripts. And they definitely need to stop surgically turning themselves into – well, into Tilly Norwood.
