Andrew Garfield is playing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, a film dramatizing the extraordinary five-day corporate crisis that erupted when Altman was fired and then reinstated in November 2023. The casting was announced in July 2025, with Garfield leading a cast that includes Monica Barbaro, Yura Borisov and Ike Barinholtz. Now, as the film approaches its 2026 release, Garfield has revealed that his preparation for Altman involved court transcripts, interviews and an unexpectedly psychological search for the parts of himself he would rather disown. 

And this time, the actor did not try to get under Altman’s skin by meeting the man himself. He went somewhere stranger: the shadowy corridors of research, transcripts and psychology.

Andrew Garfield opens up about playing Sam Altman in Artificial

Andrew Garfield told Esquire U.K. that he has never met Sam Altman and deliberately built the performance from the screenplay, court transcripts, interviews and research. “I don’t know Sam Altman. I’ve never met him,” he said.

His most provocative observation, however, moves beyond acting technique. Garfield argued that someone accepting enormous responsibility for a technology he believes could cause profound harm must possess “a certain ability to dissociate,” before describing AI as capable of doing “a hell of a lot of damage to the soul of humanity.” 

That idea fits neatly into Garfield’s more psychologically porous approach to performance. He also invoked Carl Jung’s concept of the “shadow self,” arguing that actors have to confront the qualities they instinctively reject in themselves. Rather than painting Altman as an alien figure, Garfield searched for the uncomfortable human impulses that could make such ambition recognizable.

That is where Artificial becomes more intriguing than a standard Silicon Valley biopic. The film is not simply asking what Sam Altman did. It is asking what kind of person can inhabit a world where technological power arrives faster than society can build the moral vocabulary to contain it.

Artificial turns OpenAI’s five-day crisis into Silicon Valley drama

Written by Simon Rich, Artificial centers on the November 2023 crisis in which Sam Altman was abruptly removed as OpenAI CEO before returning days later. The film transforms those five days into a pressure-cooker corporate drama, with the boardroom becoming something closer to a Silicon Valley version of a Shakespearean court.

Andrew Garfield leads the ensemble as Altman, while Yura Borisov plays OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Monica Barbaro portrays former chief technology officer Mira Murati and Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk. Mark Rylance, Jason Schwartzman, Cooper Hoffman, Billie Lourd, Zosia Mamet and Chris O’Dowd also appear. 

The movie has acquired an unusually cinematic backstory of its own. Amazon MGM dropped the nearly completed $40 million production in June 2026, only months after Amazon announced a $50 billion investment in OpenAI. In that sense, Artificial has already begun behaving like the story it wants to tell: a movie about power, technology and uncomfortable alliances that somehow keeps generating its own plot twists outside the frame.

What do you think of Garfield’s take on playing Sam Altman, and does his reading of AI’s impact on humanity change how you see Artificial? Share your thoughts in the comments.