Calling AI damaging to humanity’s soul, Andrew Garfield recalls strange approach to Artificial’s Sam Atlman
Andrew Garfield’s turn in Artificial has him chewing on some unsettling ideas about AI, power, and where that leaves the rest of us.
Andrew Garfield says he never sat down with Sam Altman to prepare for Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial—he built the performance from paper trails and tape. He told Esquire U.K. he leaned on the screenplay, court transcripts and interviews, mining them for a psychological portrait rather than chasing a real-life meeting.
“I don’t know Sam Altman. I’ve never met him.”
Garfield framed the role as an inward excavation, invoking Carl Jung’s “shadow self” and saying actors have to confront the parts of themselves they’d rather reject. Instead of treating Altman like an alien figure, he looked for the recognizable human drives that might fuel someone making world-bending decisions in tech.
Garfield said someone taking on that responsibility needs “a certain ability to dissociate,” and called AI capable of “a hell of a lot of damage to the soul of humanity.”
The five-day meltdown
Written by Simon Rich, Artificial dramatizes the whirlwind of November 2023, when Altman was abruptly removed as OpenAI ’s CEO and then reinstated days later. The film turns those boardroom showdowns into a pressure-cooker corporate drama about power, panic and loyalty under a very public microscope.
- Andrew Garfield — Sam Altman
- Yura Borisov — Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI co-founder, former chief scientist)
- Monica Barbaro — Mira Murati (former chief technology officer)
- Ike Barinholtz — Elon Musk
- Mark Rylance
- Jason Schwartzman
- Cooper Hoffman
- Billie Lourd
- Zosia Mamet
- Chris O’Dowd
Garfield’s comments tilt the movie away from a simple reenactment and toward a character study—what kind of person runs headfirst into technology moving faster than our moral language can catch it? His choice to avoid meeting Altman suggests the film isn’t chasing impersonation so much as a portrait of ambition under extraordinary pressure.
The project had been aiming for a 2026 release. In a real-world twist, Amazon MGM dropped the nearly completed $40 million film in June 2026, only months after Amazon announced a $50 billion investment in OpenAI.