Meet world's first android actress

Meet Geminoid F. In many ways, she’s perfect for the movie business. She’s beautiful, engaging, and can carry out a director’s every request on cue.

Time after time, she replicates the same performance without the slightest fluff or fumble, and can work for weeks on end without complaint. You don’t even have to pay her. Just remember to plug her in at night so she doesn’t die on set the next day, and she’ll be fine.

Geminoid F is an android – a robot designed to look and act like a human being (although the one thing she cannot do is walk) – and the first of her kind to co-star in a film. That feels like something of a milestone, considering cinema is full of memorable android characters. But from the seductive “machine-human” Maria in Fritz Lang’s 1927 monolith Metropolis to Star Wars’ C-3PO, Blade Runner’s replicants, and the enigmatic Ava from this year’s Ex Machina, almost all have been played by flesh-and-blood actors in costumes. (The others, including Sonny from the Will Smith blockbuster I, Robot, are digital creations, brought to life with motion capture technology.)

At this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, Geminoid F made an appearance on the red carpet for the world premiere of her first feature (in a wheelchair: she can’t walk independently). The film, a science-fiction drama called Sayonara, is written and directed by Koji Fukada and follows the relationship between two friends in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster.

One, Tania, is played by the 27-year-old human actress Bryerly Long, and is dying of radiation poisoning. The other, Tania’s “companion robot”, called Leona, is played by Geminoid F. Leona is in a wheelchair due to a faulty knee joint and has no understanding of what dying means. (The film is very good, but by no means a laugh riot.)

Though a small number of other humans drift through the film, for the most part the two women are alone together, either reminiscing and reading poetry in Tania’s house or going for walks in the surrounding grey-gold countryside. Fukada adapted it from a short play of the same name by Oriza Hirata, which also starred Geminoid F and Long, and has toured Europe, the United States and Canada since its premiere in Japan in 2010.

Geminoid F’s creator, Prof Hiroshi Ishiguro, says: “Simplicity leaves room for our imaginations to be stimulated. Conventionally beautiful faces don’t have many unusual characteristics.”