Andrew Garfield admitted he once had “deep admiration” for Sam Altman before portraying the OpenAI CEO in Luca Guadagnino’s film “Artificial,” explaining that the tech leader had him convinced he was “nothing but purely altruistic.”
During a Q&A following a Monday night screening of the Neon film, Garfield touched on his first impression of the entrepreneur, confessing he was actually a fan of Altman at the beginning.
“The first time I saw Sam, he was testifying in front of Congress, and he was saying incredibly righteous stuff,” the actor recalled. “He was talking about transparency. He was talking about the risks. He was very, very casually saying, ‘No, I don’t have any equity in OpenAI. I’m just doing this because I love the technology and I’m passionate and I actually care about human beings.’ And I thought it was also just incredibly courageous for an out gay, you know, tech genius to be sat in front of Republican congressmen who probably don’t believe in his right to exist.”
“So all of these things were adding up for me, and I was in such deep admiration of him,” he continued. “I was like, ‘Oh, we need more of these very [people].’”
As Garfield went on, he remembered being impressed by Altman’s connection with Jack Kornfield, an “incredible Buddhist teacher.”
“And I’m like, ‘This guy might be like, my future best friend,’” he added. “I was like, ‘Oh no, he’s like genuinely great, and he seems to really have his values and priorities in the right place.’”
While this may’ve been Garfield’s “first flush” with Altman, he revealed that the more he became familiar with the OpenAI CEO, the more he saw that the “quote about him being king of the cannibal island [was] accurate.”
“You know, he convinced me that that he was nothing but purely altruistic,” Garfield said of Altman’s “persona in the world,” hinting that this wasn’t who the businessman was behind closed doors.
“I mean, it’s all playing out. I’m not going to comment on those things,” Garfield said, seemingly alluding to the growing concerns around artificial intelligence and those who control it. “We’re all seeing what’s happening. We can all have our own feelings and opinions of that.”
Nonetheless, Garfield said that he still has hope that humanity will refuse to give “our future away,” especially following the release of “Artificial.” Garfield echoed director Luca Guadagnino’s description of the movie, calling it “a very humane film.”
“I feel like if enough artists and if enough people who have power can regulate, can be a part of a conversation of making sure that we aren’t just giving our future away [or] lose all of our autonomy, I think we’ll be maybe okay,” he said.
“Artificial,” which is set to hit theaters on Christmas Day, stars Garfield as Altman and Ike Barinholtz as OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk. The film made headlines this summer after Amazon infamously dropped the Simon Rich-written and Guadagnino-directed project after it invested $50 billion in the artificial intelligence company.
It was later picked up by Neon, which plans to give the movie a wider rollout in January 2027.
A teaser for the film, released in September, showed Garfield’s Altman as he walked through a seemingly normal OpenAI compound – that eventually led to a vault filled with guns and other dangerous weaponry. In a voiceover, the film-version of Altman noted, “We opened Pandora’s Box together. The future is inevitable … Countries will fall. Industries are gonna collapse, and we get to be the ones to shepherd people into this new world.”
In addition to Garfield and Barinholtz, “Artificial” stars Yura Borisov, Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, and Mark Rylance.
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