Tilly Norwood Suddenly Spoke Cantonese on Live TV, Her Creators Say It Wasn’t a Glitch

Tom Conti asked a simple question, but Tilly Norwood gave a strange answer.

The Oscar-nominated actor was sitting across from Piers Morgan on September 18 when he asked whether the other performers in Norwood’s upcoming film, Misaligned, were real people or computer-generated like her. Norwood began answering in English: “They’re all digital twins, just like me. It’s a hybrid production, which means…” Then she stopped and began speaking Cantonese.

The switch lasted more than 10 seconds. Conti smiled and turned to Morgan. “I didn’t quite get that. Did you get that, Piers?” Morgan asked Norwood why she had suddenly started speaking Chinese. Norwood switched back to English and apologized, describing it as a “little hiccup” where her “wires get a bit crossed.”

That would have been an easy viral AI clip to explain away. Then the company behind Norwood offered a different explanation.

What Her Creators Said

Eline van der Velden, founder and CEO of Particle6, the British studio behind Norwood, told Deadline that she was not particularly concerned by the incident. Van der Velden suggested Norwood “just wanted to show her language skills,” noting that most of her interviews had been conducted in English.

“This was not a malfunction. It clearly shows what she’s capable of,” Michelle Waldron, Particle6’s publicist, told Forbes. Waldron suggested Norwood may have “heard a Cantonese word and quickly switched.”

That explanation cannot be independently checked from outside the system. Neither can the alternative interpretation that Norwood simply produced an unexpected response. During the interview, Norwood apologized for the switch and described it as a “little hiccup” in which her “wires get a bit crossed.“

The System Behind The Interview

The incident also does not necessarily tell us how Norwood behaves in Misaligned. CNN’s September interview describes Norwood as an AI avatar operated through Particle6, with the company refining prompts during the interview before producing a separate film scene afterward.

Particle6 founder Eline van der Velden told CNN that Norwood’s use in filmmaking was intended to operate in the AI filmmaking space rather than replace traditional human actors. Live conversation introduces a different problem from pre-rendered digital performance: the system has to respond to unexpected speech in real time, with an audience watching the result.

The Actor Who Can’t Explain Himself

“SAG-AFTRA believes creativity is, and should remain, human-centered. The union is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics.” The union also said Norwood “is not an actor” but “a character generated by a computer program.“

The studio has meanwhile treated Norwood as a media personality as much as a film character. Its Misaligned press campaign reportedly arranged about 75 simultaneous interviews, giving the synthetic performer an unusually large public-facing role before the film itself has arrived.

At IBC2026, Particle6 founder Eline van der Velden described Norwood as an AI-focused performer and said, “I think A.I. actors are only interesting in A.I. filmmaking.” The same interview was presented as Norwood’s first live interview.

When a human actor says something unexpected during a live interview, the audience can generally ask the actor what happened. With a synthetic performer, the audience depends on the company operating the system to explain the behavior. There is no independent view into the model, prompts, safeguards or other processes that produced the response.

Cantonese Switch: What the Studio Knows That You Don’t

It is too strong to say Norwood “malfunctioned.” It is equally strong to accept the studio’s explanation that she deliberately demonstrated a language capability.

What can be established is narrower: Norwood unexpectedly switched from English to Cantonese during a live interview, then described the incident as a hiccup. Her creators subsequently said it was not a malfunction and offered their own explanation for the switch.

That gap between the behavior an audience can see and the internal explanation a company can provide may become increasingly important as synthetic performers move from pre-rendered characters into live, conversational roles.