Andrew Garfield Plays Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial After Its Festival Premiere

Andrew Garfield is Sam Altman for two hours, and he has already decided the charm was the first read. At the world premiere of Artificial at the New York Film Festival on Monday, October 5, Garfield described watching Altman testify to Congress and thinking the OpenAI chief seemed honest, transparent, and uninterested in a personal stake. “And then you learn more about a person,” he said. He spent two to three months on footage before the cameras rolled. While they were shooting, he said, stories about the dangers of AI were landing every day. He called the part a moral responsibility. He has not met Altman. Altman says the same, with one exception: a wave. Luca Guadagnino directed. Simon Rich wrote the script and produces with David Heyman, Jeffrey Clifford, Jennifer Fox, and Guadagnino. The film is a biographical comedy-drama about the five days in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Altman and then put him back. Neon is releasing it theatrically on December 25, in time for this year’s awards calendar. Amazon MGM Studios developed and financed it, then dropped it. The budget has been reported around $40 million. The Cast Around the Crisis Garfield is Altman. Monica Barbaro plays Mira Murati, then chief technology officer. Yura Borisov plays Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist and co-founder on the side of the firing. Cooper Hoffman plays Greg Brockman, the board chairman who walked out with Altman. Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk, a former co-founder. Jason Schwartzman, Mark Rylance, Cooper Koch, Billie Lourd, Zosia Mamet, and Chris O’Dowd fill out the company. Damon Albarn is scoring. Malik Hassan Sayeed is the cinematographer. Heyday Films is on the production slate. The September teaser is Garfield, in Altman’s backpack and cadence, narrating the launch of ChatGPT: Pandora’s box, countries falling, industries collapsing, and the people in the room as the ones who shepherd everyone else through. Guadagnino tried prosthetics to push the resemblance and later called the test ridiculous. The performance is walk, neck, and light makeup. Borisov has talked about a “spiritual connection” that unlocked Sutskever. Garfield told The Hollywood Reporter he used a Stanislavski pass — what the character says about others, what others say about him — and then called people who had actually dealt with Altman, on the view that every narrator is unreliable. He put the notes in a pot and played his own version. In an August Esquire profile he was blunter. He said he does not know Altman, worked from the script, transcripts, and interviews, and that anyone who takes responsibility for a technology that will do “a hell of a lot of damage to the soul of humanity” needs a certain ability to dissociate. That is an actor’s reading, not a finding. It is the reading the film is built on. What Altman Says He Saw Altman told Vanity Fair he had seen the trailer and that Garfield walked like him. One morning he went out for coffee and found a crew on his street, and a man in his clothes and his backpack. He called it a glitch in the simulation. They waved. They did not speak. “I waved at him that one time and that was it.” Notices had gone up about filming. He had not clocked what the shoot was. The production had come to the house. The subject and the actor shared a sidewalk and nothing else. That is a better scene than most biopics get, and it is not in the movie. It is the gap the movie is selling: a portrait made without the subject’s cooperation, released by a studio that picked the film up after the studio that financed it decided the film was a problem. Why Amazon Left Amazon MGM developed Artificial, then said it would be better served by a different distributor. The walkaway followed Amazon’s announcement of a partnership and investment path involving OpenAI, reported around $50 billion in some accounts of the tie-up. Netflix, A24, and Focus Features were reported to have passed. Neon took it. A Christmas release from Neon is an awards bet, not a wide-tentpole bet. The five-day firing is already a business story with a known ending. The film has to make the hours inside those five days feel unsettled anyway. Garfield has played a real tech figure before. He was Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network, the roommate on the wrong side of the cap table. Artificial puts him on the other side of that kind of story: the founder the board tries to remove, who returns because the staff and the investors will not have it. Saverin was the wound. Altman, in this telling, is the person who keeps the company. What to Watch Reviews out of the October 5 premiere, and whether the comedy or the crisis is what critics keep. Whether Altman says more than the wave. Neon’s December 25 rollout against an awards field that already includes bigger studio titles. How Barbaro’s Murati and Borisov’s Sutskever land with people who watched the real firing in public Slack screenshots. Any OpenAI comment once the film is reviewable, rather than trailer-able. Garfield came to Artificial thinking the congressional witness looked like the adult in the room. He leaves the premiere saying the second read was the job. The film opens Christmas Day. The man he is playing has already watched him walk down the street.