Somewhere between the court transcripts, the research, and the five-day corporate drama of November 2023, Andrew Garfield found something in Sam Altman he did not entirely love. "Ultimately I'm like, 'Thank God that's over,'" Garfield said in a new interview.
The 43-year-old actor plays OpenAI's CEO in Luca Guadagnino's Artificial, a biographical comedy drama written by Simon Rich that recreates Altman's abrupt firing and swift rehiring at the company he co-founded. Garfield never met his subject to prepare. "I don't know Sam Altman. I've never met him. I was going off of the script and court transcripts and interviews and research, and we were telling a story."
What the research revealed was a character defined by competitive logic. "With Sam, everything's a game. It's a game and everything gets very, very simple. It's, 'I know I have to win this game, because I am the most 'good' person, and if I don't win this game, Elon Musk wins this game.'" Garfield also said that taking on a role in service of technology "you know is going to do a hell of a lot of damage to the soul of humanity" requires "a certain ability to dissociate." He noted the part forced him to confront aspects of himself he would rather not examine. The draw, he added, traces back to a role that got away: "I think I've been fascinated since I missed that opportunity of playing Zuckerberg."
The cast includes Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati, Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton, Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, and Cooper Hoffman as Greg Brockman.
Artificial has had a complicated path to screens. Amazon MGM, which developed and financed the $40 million film, dropped it in June 2026, weeks after announcing a $50 billion investment in OpenAI. Netflix, A24, and Focus Features reportedly passed before Neon acquired worldwide rights. The film is set for a limited December 2026 qualifying run ahead of a wider 2027 release.
