Andrew Garfield attributed his decision to take on the role of OpenAI chief Sam Altman in Artificial — a feature directed by Luca Guadagnino that premiered at the London Film Festival — to a combination of curiosity and apprehension about the character. The biographical drama, covering a span of two decades, traces both the founding and the growth of OpenAI — the AI company that produced ChatGPT — along with the events of 2023 in which Altman lost and then regained his position there.
Garfield described being drawn to the project out of curiosity and a desire to understand the people steering this technological shift, adding that those at the helm of such companies face an unusual combination of public scrutiny and the need to sustain both vision and resolve. Garfield — whose filmography includes the 2010 dramatisation of Facebook's founding — made a deliberate choice to avoid any contact with Altman before taking on the part.
He conveyed to journalists a degree of sympathy for someone near his own age who finds a film being constructed around his life story, while also making clear that the production offers an interpretation of events and of Altman's role within them, not a direct biographical rendering. A request for comment directed at OpenAI went unanswered.
Speaking to a news outlet, Altman noted that he had no expectation of the portrayal being faithful to reality.
The film casts Yura Borisov — an Oscar-nominated actor from Russia — in the role of Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist whose departure from the company followed his part in the episode that briefly removed Sam Altman from its leadership. The screenplay was drawn from the work of Simon Rich, an Emmy-winning writer on Saturday Night Live.
The film traces the philosophical rift over AI safety that drove Altman and Sutskever apart — Sutskever having studied under Geoffrey Hinton, a foundational figure in the field, with Mark Rylance taking on the role of Hinton on screen. Ike Barinholtz takes on the role of Tesla chief executive Elon Musk in the production, while the role of Mira Murati, who once held the position of chief technology officer at OpenAI, is played on screen by Monica Barbaro.
Production on the project wrapped in 2025, a period when disputes over AI governance had been building at companies including OpenAI and Anthropic — centring on whether automated systems might operate outside any meaningful human check. Guadagnino later described the material as having felt unusually immediate on set, with cast and crew watching the actual individuals portrayed in the film trade public arguments on social media while cameras were still rolling.
Garfield described the experience as both invigorating and daunting, noting that a commitment to accuracy becomes difficult when the underlying facts appear to shift from one month to the next.
