Andrew Garfield plays OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in the film Artificial, which premiered at the London Film Festival on October 11. Garfield said, "I was drawn to it by pure curiosity and fear." The movie explores the rise of OpenAI and the people who are shaping our new world.
Actor Andrew Garfield believes the people steering the artificial intelligence revolution are also shaping the world to come. The actor, who plays OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino's Artificial, said curiosity and fear drew him to the film, which explores the rise of the AI giant behind ChatGPT and the people wielding power over this rapidly evolving technology.
The film premiered at the London Film Festival on Sunday, October 11. It spans two decades, chronicling the origins and growth of OpenAI along with the dramatic firing and rehiring of Altman in 2023.
In an interview with Reuters, Garfield said he was drawn to the project by a desire to understand the people driving the next phase of technological change. "I think the reason I was drawn to it was just pure curiosity and fear and really trying to understand as deeply as possible the people who are ushering us into this next phase of the world," he said.
Garfield, who previously starred in The Social Network (2010), the film about the origins of Facebook, said those leading major technology companies wield considerable influence over the world and must be scrutinised.
"There's a sense of courage and imagination and resilience these people at the top of these companies must have, the ability to withstand so much criticism and such a microscopic lens on them as people. And it's important that we do that because we need to know who's in power and who's creating our new world," he said.
Andrew Garfield on playing Sam Altman
Garfield revealed that he neither contacted nor met Altman while preparing for the role. He also expressed compassion for the OpenAI chief, noting that a film about a real person inevitably offers an interpretation of their life rather than a definitive account.
"I don't know Sam and I have a lot of compassion for a person who's my age, almost, and there's a movie being made about him," Garfield said. "It's not him, but it's an idea of what this story is and his part in it."
Speaking about the film, Altman told Vanity Fair in an interview that he was not expecting an "accurate depiction".
A film about OpenAI's internal conflict
Written by Emmy-winning Saturday Night Live writer Simon Rich, Artificial features Russian actor and Oscar nominee Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's co-founder and former chief scientist.
Sutskever left the company after his involvement in Altman's brief ouster in 2023. The film explores the ethical disagreements and tensions surrounding AI safety between the two men. Sutskever trained under Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as the "Godfather of AI", who is portrayed by Mark Rylance.
The cast also includes Ike Barinholtz as Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati, OpenAI's former chief technology officer.
Shot in 2025, the film arrives amid growing concerns about artificial intelligence and whether increasingly powerful systems could eventually slip beyond human control. Recent incidents involving OpenAI and Anthropic have added to those anxieties.
'The truth seems to change every month'
Barbaro said the film's relevance to ongoing developments in the technology industry made the experience of shooting it particularly unusual.
"It's so fascinating making a film like this when the topic is so relevant right now," she said.
The actor recalled watching real-time exchanges on social media between the people she and her co-stars were portraying, even as they recreated their stories on set.
"We'd be on set, watching two people argue with each other on Twitter, who we were portraying in this movie. It was really wild to have that experience. It's exciting and it's also really daunting because you want to be truthful, but the truth seems to change every month," Barbaro said.
Artificial is set to release in the US on December 25, 2026.