Eline Van der Velden

Eline Van der Velden (born 1985 or 1986 in Curaçao) is a Dutch comedian, actress, and producer with an unusual résumé: she trained at Tring Park performing-arts school, earned a physics MSc from Imperial College London in 2008, won a Lovie Award for online comedy, and appeared in BBC shows including Soft Border Patrol. In 2016 she founded the production company Particle6.

The Tilly Norwood firestorm

In 2025, Xicoia — Particle6’s AI talent division — unveiled Tilly Norwood, a wholly AI-generated “actress” built through some 2,000 iterations, at the Zurich Film Festival, along with news that talent agencies were circling. The backlash was immediate: SAG-AFTRA declared that “Tilly Norwood is not an actor,” and stars including Emily Blunt voiced outrage at the prospect of synthetic performers.

Van der Velden, herself a former actor, refused to back down. In a September 2025 statement she called Norwood “not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work — a piece of art,” and described AI as “a new tool — a new paintbrush,” comparing the panic to earlier resistance against animation and CGI. She later told Variety she deliberately made Norwood as realistic as possible to provoke exactly this conversation.

The provocation became a business. By mid-2026 Norwood was cast in her first feature film, Misaligned, and Van der Velden was predicting to The Hollywood Reporter that audiences would “see a lot of Tilly Norwood next year” — while insisting that AI filmmaking still demands “substantial amounts of human craft, skill, judgement and time.”