Andrew Garfield Says OpenAI’s Sam Altman Seemed ‘F—ing Great’ Before Playing Him in ‘Artificial’: And Then You Learn More About a Person’

Andrew Garfield admits he was initially charmed by Sam Altman before he portrayed the controversial CEO of OpenAI in director Luca Guadagnino’s new film “Artificial.”

“I remember seeing Sam testifying to Congress for the first time, way back when,” Garfield recalled on Monday night at the movie’s world premiere at the New York Film Festival. “I was like, ‘This guy seems fucking great. He’s honest. He’s transparent. He’s talking about regulation, and he has no stake in OpenAI. We need more of these people in control. He’s incredibly charming and charismatic.’ And then you learn more about a person.”

Garfield, who spent “two to three months” listening and watching footage of Altman while preparing to play him, described feeling a moral responsibility to participate in a movie like “Artificial.”

“We need to shine the light as bright as possible at the nooks and crannies of people we’re giving all of our autonomy and power to,” Garfield said.

Garfield was joined at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall by Guadagnino, writer Simon Rich and actors Yura Borisov (as OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever), Ike Barinholtz (as Elon Musk) and Cooper Hoffman (as OpenAI president Greg Brockman). Monica Barbaro, who portrays OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati, wasn’t in attendance. The movie charts the evolution of OpenAI and dramatizes the tumultuous time when Altman was controversially fired and then rehired by the AI giant.

Garfield has portrayed many real people on screen, including Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin in “The Social Network” and composer Jonathan Larson in “Tick, Tick… Boom.” It’s a responsibility the actor doesn’t take lightly.

“I feel a tremendous amount of compassion for what that must feel like, being on the inside of his soul, going like, ‘That’s not me,’” Garfield said of Altman. “I imagine it would feel confronting. I would feel that way. I’m projecting.”

In any case, the real Altman seems to be shrugging off “Artificial,” which he hasn’t seen. “I mean, they’re trying to make a good movie, and maybe it will be good,” Altman said in a wide-ranging interview with Vanity Fair, adding that “it will not be good as an accurate depiction.”

Borisov, a recent Oscar nominee for “Anora,” admits he’s worried about what the real-life Sutskever — and the public — will think about the film.

“I can’t answer so beautiful like Andrew. That’s why he’s playing Sam,” Borisov joked. “I was nervous to watch this. It was our first time. [I have] so much feeling now about this. It’s like a child just being born, and you’re waiting for it to start breathing.”

Barinholtz, meanwhile, doesn’t seem too concerned about Musk’s reaction.

“When you’re playing as someone universally beloved as Elon, and who everyone admires and who is a good person and walks normally…,” Barinholtz cracked. “When I first met with Luca, I said, ‘I have very complicated opinions on Elon.’ And he said, ‘It’s not about what you feel about Elon. It’s about finding what he loves about himself.’

Barinholtz found it “interesting” to play Musk at this particular moment in time. “It’s not at the RNC with the chainsaw. This is him in 2014 when a lot of people were like, ‘This guy is amazing. He’s going to save you.'”

Rich, a humorist who worked at “Saturday Night Live” and penned the 2020 satire “An American Pickle,” was inadvertently motivated to write “Artificial” by his childhood friend, Danny Selsam.

“He started warning me about artificial intelligence in 2008. My friends and I were so shocked by his predictions that we actually discussed potentially doing an intervention to get them medicated, or perhaps institutionalized. We thought he lost his mind,” Rich said. “We took him a little bit more seriously when he joined this new nonprofit called OpenAI.”

A year before ChatGPT was released, Rich says, “Danny started showing us stuff on his computer that was so terrifying that I felt the urge to warn people. When I told journalists what I had seen, they thought it was a hoax. They thought I was trying to prank them.”

Rich tried to vocalize his concerns, writing about the dangers in columns for outlets like Time magazine. But the public failed to take notice.

“I quickly realized there’s a limit to what I can do being a non-celebrity and not particularly charismatic or good-looking,” Rich said. “So this is kind of a last-ditch effort to warn mankind. I wrote this movie and
I hope to god that a couple people pay attention.”

A late addition to the NYFF lineup, “Artificial” became one of the year’s buzziest releases after Amazon MGM dropped the nearly completed film, saying the movie would be “better served if it were released by a different studio.” That’s after Amazon signed a major $50 billion partnership with OpenAI. And Altman is close with Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, having attended his Venetian wedding to Lauren Sanchez in 2025.

Neon ultimately acquired “Artificial” and plans to release the film in theaters on Dec. 25.

Landing the world premiere of “Artificial” was a coup for NYFF artistic director Dennis Lim, who described the movie’s festival plans as a “genuinely up-in-the-air situation.” Lim noted that Guadagnino has a long history with New York Film Festival, having premiered movies such as “Call Me by Your Name,” “Bones and All,” “Queer” and “After the Hunt” at prior editions.

“I thought we would be a great launchpad for the film,” Lim told Variety prior to the premiere. “This is a film that deals with a very pressing situation. AI is in the news practically daily. The film recaps this trajectory that we’ve been on with alarming clarity. And it does this in the form of an incredibly entertaining movie. It has a very dark humor, which is certainly one valid way of approaching the dystopian present.”