Andrew Garfield ‘really scared’ of backlash to playing Sam Altman in OpenAI film
Andrew Garfield will play Sam Altman in Artificial (Getty Images)
Andrew Garfield has said he is “really scared” about potential backlash to his portrayal of OpenAI boss Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming film Artificial.
Speaking in a candid SmartLess podcast interview to hosts Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett, Garfield said: “I’m nervous about that one. I’m really scared about that one.”
When asked if he meant “backlash”, he replied: “Well, yeah. You’re playing one of arguably that most powerful people on this planet right now, or an interpretation of this person.”
Garfield also stressed he has not met Altman. “I’ve never met Sam Altman, I don’t know anything about the interior of his soul. I just had to interpret what I understood, what I saw, what I read, what my imagination gave me, and what the script gave me,” he said.
He later joked Altman had “probably hacked my phone” and was “probably observing every move I make”.
What Artificial is about
Artificial is directed by Guadagnino and dramatises Altman’s firing and later rehiring from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2023.
The biographical comedy drama is written by former Saturday Night Live writer Simon Rich and is due in cinemas on 5 October.
The cast includes Monica Barbaro, Yura Borisov, Mark Rylance, Jason Schwartzman and Zosia Mamet. Cooper Hoffman plays Greg Brockman, and Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk.
Garfield said he hopes the film avoids flattening its characters into easy archetypes: “I hope we’re not villainising anyone or making anyone into a hero or villain. What Luca’s films do, he gets into the grey area of what it is to be human,” he said.
Distributor switch before release
The film’s release plans have already shifted. Amazon MGM Studios pulled out as distributor earlier this year, and in June said the nearly finished $40million film would “be better served if it were released by a different studio”.
Neon later won the rights to release it in a bidding war.
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