Andrew Garfield opens up about playing Sam Altman in ‘Artificial’

Andrew Garfield is opening up about stepping into the shoes of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming film “Artificial.”

Garfield portrays the tech executive in the drama, which takes place during the five-day corporate saga in November 2023 that saw Altman abruptly fired as OpenAI CEO before ultimately returning to the company. In a new interview with Esquire U.K., Garfield stressed that his portrayal isn’t based on any personal relationship with Altman.

“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.”

Garfield also said his usual acting process required him to look for elements of Altman within himself, including traits he might rather reject. He described the exercise using Carl Jung’s concept of “the shadow self,” or, as Garfield put it, “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.

“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 fucking pig?’ We can identify that this is the bad part of us. We know this in ourselves.”

“Artificial,” written by Simon Rich, also stars Monica Barbaro as former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, Yura Borisov as OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk. Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Billie Lourd, Zosia Mamet, Chris O’Dowd and Mark Rylance round out the ensemble.

wn. Amazon MGM Studios, which originally developed and financed the roughly $40 million project, dropped “Artificial” in June after principal photography had been completed. The move came months after Amazon announced a major investment in OpenAI. Amazon said at the time that it believed the film would be “better served if it were released by a different studio.”

-Variety