Mara Wilson

Mara Wilson (born 1987) was one of the most beloved child actors of the 1990s — Natalie in Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), Susan in Miracle on 34th Street (1994), and the title role in Matilda (1996) — before stepping away from film and reinventing herself as a writer, with the memoirs Where Am I Now? and Good Girls Don’t. Her essays on how Hollywood treats young women gave her unusual authority when the industry met its first synthetic starlet.

Against Tilly Norwood

In September 2025, after reports that talent agencies wanted to sign Tilly Norwood — an AI-generated “actress” built by Eline Van der Velden’s studio Xicoia — Wilson responded with two of the backlash’s most-quoted lines: “And what about the hundreds of living young women whose faces were composited together to make her? You couldn’t hire any of them?” and, of the AI’s creators, “You didn’t make this… You took their work and pretended it was yours.”

Wilson told Marie Claire she found it “very strange and upsetting that the very first thing that somebody did was create an image of a young woman that could be easily manipulated to do whatever they want,” drawing on her own experience of having her childhood face pasted into inappropriate imagery by age twelve. Her objections joined a chorus that included Emily Blunt, Melissa Barrera, and SAG-AFTRA itself, which condemned Norwood as a character trained on the work of countless performers without consent or compensation.