Ella Stiller is in the middle of a career run that now includes a new CBS legal drama and a blunt view on AI. She says she has never opened ChatGPT once in her life, even as she works on Cupertino, the Robert and Michelle King series where she plays Christy.
That makes her comments land now, because Cupertino is built around Silicon Valley and the pressure points of Big Tech. On the show, Christy is a plucky jack-of-all-trades and former assistant who is hired by lawyers Michael Price and Olivia Siffre after they are fired from the same firm, then becomes their investigator and leans on local relationships to gather evidence. One storyline even sends the firm's lawyers after an evolved AI chatbot as a client, which gives Stiller's off-camera view a sharper edge.
Stiller did not sound conflicted about the job itself. She called the set “an absolute dream” and said the showrunners are “such incredible leaders,” adding that their energy is “so positive” and that she ended up working with “the greatest television showrunners ever.” For an actor who is 24 and only graduated from the Juilliard School in 2024, it is a quick rise into a 20-episode season of television.
Her path to Cupertino has moved fast. After Juilliard, she landed her first post-graduation role on And Just Like That…, where she played Mia, a salon shampoo girl who becomes pregnant with a child fathered by Miranda's son Brady. She had appeared earlier as a teen driver in Escape at Dannemora when she was 16, and she has also taken on Patience in the third season of The Comeback. The work has made her a familiar name in a narrow but visible stretch of TV, even as she keeps talking about craft in old-school terms.
That is where the friction sits. Stiller says AI in the creative world is where she gets “really bummed out,” which sits awkwardly beside a series that is already leaning into the subject on screen. The show is about lawyers fighting David-vs.-Goliath cases against Big Tech, and it is also giving them an AI client, so her personal discomfort is not a side note but part of the same conversation the drama is trying to stage.
Cupertino is set to air until spring 2027, so Stiller is likely to keep living inside that debate for a while. The open question is not whether she will keep saying no to ChatGPT; it is whether the show's next chapters push the AI story further, and whether Christy's practical, ground-level work keeps putting her at the center of it.
