Andrew Garfield Gets Candid About Playing Sam Altman in ARTIFICIAL and the Dark Side of OpenAI

Andrew Garfield is taking on one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern tech, and he has some pretty strong thoughts about the world surrounding him.

Garfield plays OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in Artificial, the upcoming film from Luca Guadagnino centered on the chaotic five-day stretch in November 2023 when Altman was abruptly fired from OpenAI, only to return as CEO days later.

It was a bizarre corporate power struggle when it happened, and turning it into a movie gives Guadagnino plenty of interesting material to play with.

Speaking with Esquire U.K. about the role, Garfield explained that he didn’t build his performance around any personal connection with Altman.

The two have never met. Instead, the actor worked from the screenplay, interviews, court transcripts, and other research while trying to understand the kind of person capable of carrying that much power and responsibility.

“I don’t know Sam Altman. I’ve never met him,” Garfield said. “I was going off of the script and court transcripts and interviews and research, and we were telling a story.

“But 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.”

That’s a pretty intense assessment of the technology at the center of Artificial. Garfield’s comments also make it clear that his approach to playing Altman wasn’t simply about mimicking the OpenAI executive.

He wanted to figure out what aspects of the character he could recognize within himself, including qualities he might instinctively want to reject.

Garfield connected that process to Carl Jung’s idea of “the shadow self,” which he described as “the aspects of ourselves that we disown.” “There’s something there for me to integrate, because I’m so afraid of being it,” he said.

For Garfield, that exploration extends far beyond Altman. He argued that people can become too comfortable separating themselves entirely from qualities they despise in others, rather than acknowledging that some version of those impulses can exist within anyone.

“But then the argument is, that if we weren’t all less rejecting in the first place, less ‘that’s not us’, then Donald Trump wouldn’t have been voted in twice, and Nigel Farage wouldn’t be anywhere near a position of power,” he continued.

“Whereas if we go, ‘OK, interesting — where am I [in a] wannabe fascist, grifter, opportunist, power-hungry, ethic-less, spineless f*cking pig?’ We can identify that this is the bad part of us. We know this in ourselves.”

Garfield clearly went into some uncomfortable territory while figuring out how to approach Altman, which could make his performance one of the more interesting parts of the film.

Rather than treating the OpenAI story as a straightforward corporate drama, Artificial appears positioned to dig into the personalities, ambitions, ethics, and power struggles involved in one of the strangest chapters of the AI industry.

The cast certainly gives Guadagnino plenty to work with. Monica Barbaro plays former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, Yura Borisov takes on OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk.

The ensemble also includes Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Billie Lourd, Zosia Mamet, Chris O’Dowd, and Mark Rylance. The screenplay comes from Simon Rich.

The movie has already experienced some corporate drama of its own. Amazon MGM Studios originally developed and financed Artificial with a reported budget of roughly $40 million, but the studio dropped the film in June after principal photography had already wrapped.

That decision came months after Amazon announced a major investment in OpenAI. At the time, Amazon said it believed the movie would be “better served if it were released by a different studio.”

Neon ultimately stepped in and acquired worldwide theatrical rights to Artificial.

Artificial has the ingredients for a pretty wild tech drama, and Garfield sounds like he approached Sam Altman as much more than another real-life figure to imitate. With the actual OpenAI saga already strange enough to feel scripted, it’ll be interesting to see what Guadagnino and his cast do with it.