Key Points
- Luca Guadagnino's OpenAI drama Artificial premiered Sunday at the London Film Festival.
- Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman across two decades, including his 2023 firing and rehiring.
- Altman told Vanity Fair he was not expecting an accurate depiction of himself.
The latest:
Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s film about OpenAI, premiered Sunday at the London Film Festival with Andrew Garfield playing chief executive Sam Altman, Reuters reported. The drama spans two decades of the ChatGPT maker’s rise and centres on Altman’s abrupt ouster and return in 2023. Garfield said curiosity and fear drew him to the role.
Details:
- The role: Garfield told Reuters he was drawn to the project by a wish to understand the people ushering the world into its next phase. He said executives at the top of such companies need courage, imagination and resilience to withstand sustained criticism and intense scrutiny, and that the public needs to know who holds that power.
- No contact: Garfield did not approach or meet Altman while preparing, according to Reuters. He said he does not know Altman and feels compassion for someone close to his own age having a film made about him, adding that the character is not Altman himself but an idea of the story and his part in it.
- Altman’s response: Altman told Vanity Fair he was not expecting an accurate depiction of events. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters, and the company has not set out any position on how it is portrayed in the film.
- The central conflict: Reuters reported the screenplay follows ethical disagreements and conflict over AI safety between Altman and co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, played by Russian Oscar nominee Yura Borisov. Sutskever left OpenAI after his role in the brief removal of Altman.
- The cast: Mark Rylance plays Geoffrey Hinton, the researcher widely called the godfather of AI, who trained Sutskever. Ike Barinholtz appears as Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, and Monica Barbaro plays Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former technology chief.
- Behind the script: The screenplay was written by Simon Rich, an Emmy-winning former Saturday Night Live writer. Guadagnino directed. Garfield previously starred in the 2010 Facebook origin story The Social Network, making Artificial his second film built around the founding of a defining technology company.
- Shifting target: Barbaro said shooting a film on so current a subject was unsettling, describing watching two people they were portraying argue with each other on Twitter while on set. She said the cast wanted to be truthful, but the truth seemed to change every month.
- The timing: The film was shot in 2025 and arrives as concerns mount over recent incidents at OpenAI and rival lab Anthropic that have fuelled fears about AI systems slipping beyond human control, Reuters reported. No wide release date was announced at the premiere.
Background:
Altman was removed as OpenAI chief executive in November 2023 and reinstated days later. Sutskever, the co-founder and chief scientist involved in the board’s decision, subsequently departed the company. The sequence remains the defining governance crisis of the ChatGPT era.
Between the lines:
The film’s difficulty is structural rather than dramatic: it was shot in 2025 about figures still actively feuding in public, and Barbaro’s account of watching her subject argue on Twitter mid-shoot captures that. Garfield’s framing — an idea of the story rather than the man — and Altman’s expectation of inaccuracy both concede the same point, that a settled version of these events does not yet exist.
What’s next
Watch for a distribution and release date, further festival screenings, and any response from OpenAI, Sutskever or Musk once the film reaches a wider audience.
