Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter
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Dear Tilly: Acting advice for an AI starlet
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In case you needed another reason to love Betty Gilpin — Emmy-nominated star of the late, lamented women’s wrestling comedy G.L.O.W. and author of the essay collection All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns — she came out swinging in the Hollywood Reporter last week on the topic of Tilly, the AI actress who appears to be an amalgam of every fresh-faced, corn-fed young starlet discovered at a malt shoppe.
The igitally manufactured ‘actor’ Tilly Norwood (Xicoia image)
In a lacerating piece styled as advice to the artificial ingenue, Gilpin recalls the moment as a teenager when she realized what acting could do, when a brilliant actor walked onstage and transformed a mediocre performance of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons.
“Tilly, you never had to be 14, so I’ll tell you what Google can’t. It feels like your soul gets a broken glass enema. You go from curious about this marvellous world to drowning in un-marvellous you. Who am I? How should I be? Am I alone? Your human brain answers ‘no one,’ ‘invisible’ and ‘yes.’
“I remember the bad barn play because that actor’s performance was so good that, impossibly, I left myself. My adolescent cells floated away from poor me and traded places with his. His performed pain dissolved mine, which was real. All from recognition. From connection. And then, you know, the play was bad again. But the air in the theater felt carbonated with symbiotic human experience.
“That’s our main job, Till, attempting that. The imperceptible do-si-do of my matter and yours in the air between us. Communal escape or epiphany, it’s all medicine. And it’s what makes us different from, well … from you.”
Betty Gilpin (Richard Shotwell/Invision/The Associated Press files)
It is extremely annoying that someone who is such a good actor also gets to be such an excellent writer. (Read the full piece; it is hilarious and self-deprecating in addition to being scathing.)
But honestly, only someone who has been a cog in the entertainment machine can understand how important the human element of that equation is, especially in a time when the algorithm is all.
“We can both be wish-fulfilment, monetized escape,” Gilpin — who knows she is lucky enough to once have been “almost AI-level-hot” — advises Tilly.
“But take it from a depressive who disappears too often into toilet-scrolling: Too much of that will be the end of us. While we can both be loneliness candy, you can’t be the other invisible thing. The vital thing… Tilly, you cannot look up and become half of someone. Because you are no one.”
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Jill Wilson
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Recommended
Coindentally, I just finished the audiobook of Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, which centres on a former actress’s time at a Michigan summer-stock theatre, where she has a relationship with a charismatic and careless actor who goes on to be a superstar.
It’s very much about the humanity of acting, about Method and madness.
It’s also about love and family and cherry orchards and Our Town; I cried and cried during the final chapter (a real pitfall of listening to audiobooks in the car).
It’s read by Meryl Streep and it’s hard to disentangle her performance from my enjoyment of the text — yet another tribute to the power of acting.
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