Andrew Garfield doesn’t look exactly like Sam Altman.
But the Oscar-nominated actor found a way to try to capture the essence of the OpenAI CEO he portrays in Luca Guadagnino‘s Artificial.
An attempt to use prosthetics to better resemble Altman was unsuccessful (“totally ridiculous,” according to Guadagnino), so much so that Garfield laughed as he recalled how badly that experiment went when reminded of it by The Hollywood Reporter on the red carpet ahead of Artificial‘s world premiere at the 2026 New York FIlm Festival.
Instead, ironically for the tech-forward film, Garfield relied on a classic acting technique and human conversations (an analog version of crowdsourcing).
“When you’re first learning about acting, one of the techniques, Stanislavski, is you go through the play and you see what this person says about other characters. You see what other characters say about him,” Garfield told THR. “So I tried to speak to as many people as possible who know Sam or who have experiences and interactions with Sam to glean more of an objective, moral side, looking in point of view. Everyone is an unreliable narrator. I felt like I needed to absorb as much as possible, put it in the cauldron, put it in the pot, put it on simmer and then [use] my own instincts and interpretation and point of view, because any other actor would have played it differently. I know that I needed to play it in the way that I wanted to play it.”
Artificial tells the story about both the origins of OpenAI and the rise of the artificial intelligence phenomenon, including the Silicon Valley figures at the forefront of the technology. Garfield, like his fellow castmembers in the film, looked to interviews and videos of his real-life counterpart, with Anora breakout Yura Borisov, who plays OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, also taking a surprisingly ethereal approach.
“I hit a wall, and it was a couple of days before we started to shoot,” Borisov explained of his preparations. “We have the same birthdays (Dec. 8), and I imagined, ‘OK maybe we have some spiritual connection because of this, and I can just relax and create my own character inspired by him.’”
Not Suitable for Work alum Will Angus plays former OpenAI researcher turned Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei and relished playing the exec at a time when he was somewhat under the radar.
“When we were shooting the movie, [Amodei] definitely wasn’t as in the zeitgeist as he is now, so it was very cool to learn about it from the ground floor,” Angus told THR. “We treated him well. … He really had this anxiety to make sure that AI was morally aligned with humanity so I kind of enjoyed being in that role.”
Amodei has pushed for federal safety regulations around the technology and, just last month, called for an industrywide slowdown of AI development to give safety measures time to catch up.
When asked if he believes Amodei’s AI safety concerns, Angus was cautiously optimistic.
“I hope he’s doing the best he can to make sure AI’s aligned with human goals,” he said. “I don’t know. I hope so.”
Neon, which acquired Artificial after Amazon MGM Studios abruptly dropped the nearly completed film in June, plans a Christmas Day release for the movie, which was written by Saturday Night Live alum Simon Rich and also stars Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, Monica Barbaro as OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Cooper Hoffman, Mark Rylance, Will Price, Chris O’Dowd, Billie Lourd, Zosia Mamet, Jason Schwartzman, Cooper Koch, Thaddea Graham, Nicholas Hamilton and Angus Imrie.
