“I send my kids to a school that doesn’t really use iPads or technology as much because I think it’s so important for kids to still handwrite and to read actual books that aren’t on a Kindle and to hold books and learn how to write cursive.” — Billie Lourd

Lourd said this at the October 5 world premiere of Artificial at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center during the New York Film Festival. She was there for the film, a thriller in which she stars alongside Andrew Garfield.

She shares two children with her husband, Austen Rydell: son Kingston Fisher, 6, and daughter Jackson Joanne, 3. At 34, the actress wants both of them practicing handwriting and cursive and reading books they can hold, and she has picked a school built around that.

“I really want them to be in the real world as much as possible,” Lourd said. “They learn woodworking at their school, and I think that kind of stuff is so important for kids.”

The setting gives the line its edge. Artificial centers on Sam Altman’s firing and return to OpenAI, with Garfield playing Altman, so Lourd spent the press run talking about a story pulled straight from the frontier of the technology she keeps at arm’s length at home.

Asked how she feels about technology, she did not pretend to be settled on it. “I feel scared,” Lourd said. “I feel excited about aspects of it but scared about a lot of it.”

That mix is what has kept the answer with people. She is raising kids around woodworking and physical books while starring in a film about the people building the machines, and she holds both without smoothing over the tension.