There is a very specific kind of film role that turns an actor into a lightning rod, and Andrew Garfield has just signed up for it. He is playing Sam Altman.
The 43-year-old stars in Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s dramatisation of the five extraordinary days in which the OpenAI chief executive was ousted by his own board and then reinstated at the company he co-founded. And in a new interview with Esquire UK, Garfield has been unusually candid about what it took to get inside the head of the most consequential man in tech – and how relieved he was to climb back out again.
The Role He Nearly Played 16 Years Ago
Garfield very nearly played Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network back in 2010. He was cast instead as Eduardo Saverin – the co-founder, the friend, the one who gets frozen out – and he has apparently been circling the tech-founder psyche ever since.
“I think I’ve been fascinated since I missed that opportunity (of playing Zuckerberg),” he told Esquire UK.
“Though I got given the most amazing opportunity (of playing Eduardo Saverin) and I wouldn’t have it any other way – but I definitely feel I’m closer to understanding the drives, the psychology.”
Sixteen years later, he has come back for the boss.
“With Sam, Everything’s A Game”
The most quotable line of the interview is also the most revealing one. Asked about Altman, Garfield described a mindset built entirely around winning.
“With Sam, everything’s a game. It’s a game and everything gets very, very simple. It’s, ‘I know I have to win this game, because I am the most “good” person, and if I don’t win this game, Elon Musk wins this game’,” he said.
It is worth being precise about what this is and isn’t. Garfield has never met Altman. He does not know him. His portrayal, he says, was built from the script, court transcripts, interviews and research – which makes it an interpretation rather than an exposé, and the actor is careful about that distinction.
What he is less careful about is the moral weather around the job itself.
“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 disassociate,” he said.
Why we care: We are now at the point where the founders building our tools are getting the prestige-biopic treatment while the tools are still being built. The Social Network arrived six years after Facebook launched and shaped how a generation understood it. Artificial is arriving while the story is still unfolding – and the version of Altman that lands on screen will quietly become the version a lot of people carry around in their heads.
Three Films Back-To-Back
Altman is not the only difficult man Garfield has spent the past year inhabiting. He also stars in Guadagnino’s psychological drama After The Hunt, alongside Julia Roberts and The Bear‘s Ayo Edebiri, playing a professor accused of sexual assault by a student. And he appears in Paul Greengrass’s The Uprising as a medieval ploughman leading a rebellion against King Richard.
Three films. Back to back. He is, in his own words, knackered.
“Ultimately I’m like, ‘Thank God that’s over’,” he said of the more challenging roles. “I felt that way with Sam and with Hank because I much prefer at least trying to be community-minded, a good friend. I love being a cosy guy.”
Reader, we felt that.
“I learnt a lot over the course of this past year. I did three things back to back – I’ve never done that before,” he added. “But it happened to be three things I really wanted to do and they were all happening at the same time.”
And the closing line, which we are choosing to take as a personal instruction: “And I’m going to remember that I don’t always have to be ‘on’, performing. And I’m going to think about how to live.”
What Artificial Is Actually About
The film centres on the November 2023 boardroom crisis at OpenAI – five days in which Altman was removed as chief executive, staff threatened to walk, and he returned to the company he had co-founded. It remains one of the strangest corporate episodes of the decade, and one that has never really been explained to the public’s satisfaction.
Guadagnino is an interesting choice to tell it. This is the director of Call Me By Your Name and Challengers – a filmmaker far more interested in desire, rivalry and the electricity between people than in server racks. Which suggests Artificial will be less a film about artificial intelligence than a film about ambition, loyalty and the very human business of deciding who gets to be in charge of the future.
The Bigger Picture
Garfield’s breakout came in the 2007 TV film Boy A, followed by The Social Network and Never Let Me Go in 2010. Since then: Spider-Man, Hacksaw Ridge, Tick, Tick… Boom! and, most recently, an adaptation of Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree. He has range, is the point. He also has form for playing the men who are good at the thing and shaky on the ethics.
The full interview runs in the September/October issue of Esquire UK, out 26 August.
In the meantime, we will be over here thinking about “everything’s a game” every single time we use AI.
Some of the products and services featured in this article may be from our affiliate partners, which means we may earn a small commission if you make a purchase through these links — at no extra cost to you. Our editorial team only spotlights what we genuinely love and think you will, too.