Andrew Garfield Has to Live Inside Sam Altman’s Blind Spots

Andrew Garfield said his own views on artificial intelligence have to come second while he plays OpenAI chief Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial. He was on The Discourse podcast to talk up Paul Greengrass’s The Uprising, which opens in U.S. theaters on September 10, and the questions kept sliding toward the other film, the one Neon is taking into the 64th New York Film Festival.

The world premiere on October 5 is at Alice Tully Hall at 5 p.m., with Guadagnino and members of the cast in attendance. Garfield never met Altman. He still has to walk into that room as a version of him.

Garfield Says the Job Is to Live It

He was asked what happens when the research leads him to disagree with the living person he is meant to inhabit. He would not treat that as a moral fork in the road.

I don’t really see it in that way. I feel like my job is to live it.

Andrew Garfield, actor, on The Discourse podcast

The useful question, he said, was how Altman sees himself, and how an actor could step into that private account. “What’s Sam’s relationship to Sam? Do you know what I mean? What’s my slash Sam’s relationship to me slash Sam?” He called it an attempt to be completely subjective while living his version of Sam inside this version of the story, of this script.

That is a narrower job than the one the press wants from him. Garfield can, by his own account, zoom out on adoption, artificial intelligence, technology in general, or San Francisco. He has opinions on all of it. When he is trying to inhabit another person, those opinions are the wrong instrument.

He listed the things he is actually chasing: another person’s experience, drives, longings, desires, needs, wants, fears, blind spots, and unconscious biases. “So my objective external opinion on artificial intelligence, and what I know about OpenAI and Sam Altman, is less material when I’m making the film than needing to be completely subjectively in his heart and organs and skin, or the character,” he said. Then he drew the line he has drawn before. “I’m not playing him. I’m playing a version, an interpretation.”

Damage to the Soul of Humanity

A few weeks earlier he had already said what that external opinion sounds like. In a magazine profile published August 25, the 43-year-old actor told interviewer Miranda Collinge he does not know Altman and has never met him. He worked from Simon Rich’s script, court transcripts, interviews, and other research. Then he named the quality he thinks the job requires.

“I think anyone who takes on that level of responsibility for a company or a technology that you know is going to do a hell of a lot of damage to the soul of humanity must have a certain ability to dissociate,” Garfield said. He was describing Altman. He was also describing the move he now has to make on camera.

He built the OpenAI chief as a man who has simplified the world into a contest. “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.’”

Finding that certainty meant going into what he called, after Carl Jung, the shadow self, the parts of himself he would rather disown. “There’s something there for me to integrate, because I’m so afraid of being it,” he said. He did not enjoy the stay. He grouped Altman with Hank, the professor he played for Guadagnino in After the Hunt, and with televangelist Jim Bakker. “Ultimately I’m like, ‘Thank God that’s over.’ I felt that way with Sam and with Hank. Because I much prefer at least trying to be community-minded, a good friend. I love being a cozy guy.”

Guadagnino had come back for him before After the Hunt was even out. Garfield remembered hesitating, then doing an impression of the director. “Darling, trust me. We do it, it’s gonna be incredible. It’s gonna be a masterpiece.” Guadagnino, writing to Collinge, called him sublime and said he can play any role he wants. The director had already used him once as a man who can trick you into empathy. Artificial asks for that trick again, this time on a chief executive who is still in the job.

Why Ilya Sutskever Opens the Story

Film at Lincoln Center does not open its synopsis on Altman. It opens in 2003, with Soviet-born computer scientist Ilya Sutskever studying artificial neural networks under University of Toronto professor Geoffrey Hinton, the man the copy still calls the Godfather of AI. A decade later, while Sutskever is at Google, he crosses paths with a young entrepreneur named Sam Altman, the eventual co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. Yura Borisov, the Anora actor, plays Sutskever. Mark Rylance plays Hinton. Andrew Garfield plays Altman. The festival copy calls both leads fully inhabited.

People who have read an early draft of Rich’s screenplay have described Altman as a liar and a master schemer, and Sutskever as the person the story treats as its center, an idealist who is leveraged, pushed aside, and betrayed. Neon’s own release is narrower. It says the film chronicles the days leading up to Altman’s sudden firing and reinstatement as CEO of OpenAI, with control of the technology in an AI arms race hanging in the balance. Garfield, talking to Collinge, boiled those days down to five days in November 2023.

A film that starts with Sutskever in 2003 and climaxes with a boardroom coup is not a simple CEO biopic, even if Garfield is the name on the poster. The first-look image that circulated on September 1 fed the opposite reading, the one that treats Artificial as a Sam Altman movie with a famous face attached. That is the easier sell. It is also the one that makes Garfield’s method look like a character reference.

THE OPENAI CASTING

Jason Schwartzman, Chris O’Dowd, Zosia Mamet, Cooper Koch, and Billie Lourd fill out the company. Rich wrote the script and produces with Guadagnino, Heyday Films’ David Heyman and Jeffrey Clifford, and Jennifer Fox. Malik Hassan Sayeed shot it in San Francisco and Italy. Marco Costa cut it. Damon Albarn wrote original songs and the score. Runtime at NYFF is 140 minutes.

A $50 Billion Check and a Studio Walkout

Amazon MGM Studios greenlit the picture in 2023 and paid for it. The production cost $40 million. On February 27, 2026, while the movie was still being finished, OpenAI and Amazon announced a multi-year partnership in which Amazon would invest $50 billion in OpenAI, starting with an initial $15 billion investment and another $35 billion later if conditions were met. In June, Amazon MGM said Artificial would be better served if it were released by a different studio, and that it was working with the filmmakers to find the film a new home.

Garfield later said he was and wasn’t surprised. The walkout did the arguing for him. A studio that had just tied itself to OpenAI chose not to put its name on a drama about that company’s CEO being fired by his own board. Other buyers circled and passed. On June 30, Neon took worldwide rights in a deal negotiated by Alison Cohen with CAA Media Finance and Amazon MGM. The price was not disclosed. Neon said Artificial will compete in this year’s Oscar race, a claim that now sits inside Neon’s 2027 Best Picture push.

THE FILM’S PATH TO LINCOLN CENTER

1. 2023: Amazon MGM Studios greenlights Guadagnino’s OpenAI drama at a $40 million budget.
2. November 2023: The five days the film dramatizes, Altman fired and then returned as CEO.
3. February 27, 2026: Amazon agrees to invest $50 billion in OpenAI, $15 billion up front.
4. June 2026: Amazon MGM drops distribution and says another studio should release the film.
5. June 30, 2026: Neon acquires worldwide rights and says the film will enter the Oscar race.
6. September 1, 2026: Film at Lincoln Center adds the world premiere to the NYFF Main Slate.
7. October 5, 2026: Guadagnino and cast bring Artificial into Alice Tully Hall at 5 p.m.

The first-look posts treated that path as either a rescue or a warning. One recurring complaint was the calendar itself: films about living bosses usually wait until the wreckage is history, and a movie this close to a man who still runs the company can look like propaganda. The Amazon exit cuts against that reading. If the point was to flatter Altman, the studio that had just written him a historic check would have kept the picture.

Neon Takes the Picture to Lincoln Center

NYFF runs September 25 through October 12. Artificial was a late add on September 1, after a stretch when it looked likely to skip the fall festivals altogether. Guadagnino has been through this building before, from Call Me by Your Name in the Main Slate through Bones and All and Queer in Spotlight to After the Hunt as last year’s opening night. Artistic director Dennis Lim did not talk like a programmer hedging a rescue job.

The most remarkable thing about Luca Guadagnino’s sly and sobering new film is that it finds the perfect tone to tell the story of how we arrived at the AI precipice. Artificial traces this trajectory with clear-eyed horror, dark humor, and a sense of existential urgency. If ever there was a movie for its moment, this is it.

Dennis Lim, NYFF artistic director, Film at Lincoln Center announcement

The festival copy goes further. It calls Artificial a drama of moral urgency that moves through two decades of machine-learning research and technocratic recklessness, a script that probes the gray area between human and machine, truth and lie. Lim, in the same September 1 note, called it a sly and sobering new film. Single tickets go on sale to the public on September 15 at noon Eastern. A second NYFF screening is set for October 6 at 2:30 p.m. Cast listed as attending includes Garfield, Monica Barbaro, Borisov, Barinholtz, Hoffman, Schwartzman, and O’Dowd.

Neon has not posted a wide theatrical date beyond the Oscar-race pledge. The film still has to survive the first audience that is not a test screening. Altman has not, in public, answered the performance. He does not have to. The man Garfield is playing still runs the company the movie is about.

With Sam, Everything Is a Game

Garfield has been circling this kind of man since David Fincher passed him over for Mark Zuckerberg and gave him Eduardo Saverin instead. He told Collinge he would not trade that part, and that he now feels closer to the drives. The Altman he built is a person who has decided he is the moral player in a match against Musk, which is a useful delusion if you need to fire people, raise money, or come back from a board vote in five days.

HOW GARFIELD BUILT THE ROLE

• The script: Simon Rich’s screenplay was the spine, including the version of Altman the story needs him to be.
• Court transcripts: Garfield said he used them alongside interviews and other public research, without meeting the man.
• No sitting: He has said plainly that he does not know Altman and never sat with him before playing him.
• The shadow work: He hunted inside himself for the dissociating, game-playing part he would rather disown, then tried to live there.
• The limit: He keeps repeating that the result is a version, an interpretation, not a deposition.

That last clause is doing a lot of work. A living CEO can still sue, still brief, still call a studio that wants his compute. Amazon already demonstrated the softer version of that power by walking away from a film it had financed. Garfield’s answer is to go further in, not further out, and to treat his own fear of the technology as less material than Altman’s need to win.

On October 5 he will sit in Alice Tully Hall while that wager plays in public for the first time. The credits will say he is Sam Altman. He has already said he is not.