Andrew Garfield Says Playing Sam Altman in ‘Artificial’ Forced Him to Confront the Parts of Himself He’d Rather Reject

Hollywood has spent the past few years slowly warming up to Silicon Valley as fertile dramatic territory, but few upcoming projects have carried as much real-world baggage as Luca Guadagnino’s latest. The film dramatizes one of the tech industry’s most jaw-dropping corporate meltdowns, a five-day saga that briefly upended one of the most powerful companies in AI before resolving in a way almost nobody predicted.

That project, ‘Artificial,’ has already made headlines well before its release, thanks to Amazon MGM Studios’ decision to walk away from distributing the film it originally developed and financed, reportedly due to the company’s own financial entanglement with OpenAI. Neon eventually stepped in to rescue the project after other major distributors passed, positioning the film for a release later this year with awards season in mind.

At the center of that drama is Andrew Garfield, who plays OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during the November 2023 saga that saw him abruptly fired by the company’s board before being reinstated within days. In a new cover interview with Esquire UK’s September/October issue, Garfield opened up about the psychological toll of stepping into Altman’s shoes, despite never having met the tech executive in person.

Garfield made clear his portrayal wasn’t built on any personal relationship with Altman, telling the magazine, “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.” He went further, suggesting that anyone who takes on that kind of responsibility for a technology capable of doing, as he put it, “a hell of a lot of damage to the soul of humanity” must possess “a certain ability to dissociate.”

Garfield explained that his usual acting process involves searching for elements of a character within himself, even traits he might rather not acknowledge, and that Altman proved no exception. He described the process as uncomfortable specifically because it forced him to confront parts of his own psyche he’s typically inclined to reject.

That discomfort led Garfield into a broader reflection on collective denial and its political consequences. He argued that widespread reluctance to recognize troubling traits in ourselves has real consequences, pointing to how “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 by framing the exercise as a kind of internal audit, asking whether people are willing to identify with uncomfortable labels like “wannabe fascist, grifter, opportunist, power-hungry, ethic-less, spineless” rather than distancing themselves from those qualities entirely.

Garfield also touched on the strange symmetry of finally playing a tech mogul after narrowly missing out on portraying Mark Zuckerberg in ‘The Social Network’ sixteen years ago, a role that ultimately went to Jesse Eisenberg while Garfield played Eduardo Saverin instead. He told Esquire UK he’s remained fascinated by that particular kind of psychology ever since, describing Altman’s worldview as a game where winning matters above all else, framed by the belief that losing would simply hand power to a rival like Elon Musk.

Filming ‘Artificial’ came at the tail end of an unusually demanding stretch for Garfield, who completed three back-to-back projects this past year, including ‘The Magic Faraway Tree’ and Paul Greengrass’s ‘The Uprising.’ He admitted the pace has left him “knackered” and ready for a period of normalcy, even as he continues promoting the wave of upcoming releases tied to that work.

With ‘Artificial’ still searching for its exact release date under Neon and awards season chatter already building around the project, Garfield’s willingness to dig into the uncomfortable psychological terrain behind Altman’s public persona suggests the film may be aiming for something more introspective than a straightforward corporate drama.

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