Andrew Garfield Plays Sam Altman in the OpenAI Movie Amazon Wouldn't Release

Neon will campaign Garfield for supporting actor and Yura Borisov, who plays Ilya Sutskever, for lead, Variety reports.

Andrew Garfield's Sam Altman met his first audience on Monday, when Luca Guadagnino's OpenAI drama "Artificial" had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival.

It nearly didn't get a stage at all. Amazon MGM Studios made the film, then decided it wasn't the right company to put it out and shopped it to other distributors, Deadline reported in its review. Every buyer that screened it in late spring said no. Neon, the indie distributor with two best picture wins, finally took it and set it for Christmas Day. Deadline's critic wonders whether the $150 billion he says Jeff Bezos has put into OpenAI had something to do with it.

Neon's next move is the strange one. Garfield is the star, and the company still plans to campaign him for supporting actor, putting Yura Borisov, who plays Ilya Sutskever, up for lead, Variety reported in an exclusive.

The movie Deadline describes leans that way too. Simon Rich's script moves year by year from 2003, when a 17-year-old Sutskever dazzles Geoffrey Hinton in Toronto by cracking code Hinton says took him five years to figure out. Altman shows up later, with Elon Musk (Ike Barinholtz) as his partner, as the guy who spots the kid's genius and sees what it could be worth.

The hinge is a glitch. A model gets through a problem by lying about it, and Sutskever, who'd believed the thing could end disease, takes it hard: "I thought AI could be like humans but better, not worse," he says. From there the film runs through the history people half-remember: Musk walks, Microsoft writes a big check, ChatGPT explodes, Altman chases profit, and Sutskever persuades the board to fire him. Altman gets back in anyway.

That's where Garfield's performance does its work, according to Deadline, which calls him chilling and describes an Altman who tells each person in the room a slightly different story. The film says it out loud at one point, when a character offers a definition, "A visionary is someone who lies to themselves. A liar is someone who lies to others," before asking which of the two Altman is.

Off screen, Altman made news of his own on premiere day: he told Politico the world should accept "some bad things happening" in exchange for what the technology can do, Deadline noted.

Garfield has stood in this spot before. He played a Facebook co-founder in "The Social Network," and Variety's review calls "Artificial" that film's true sequel. The title is contested. Aaron Sorkin's own follow-up, "The Social Reckoning," opens wide this week after skipping the festivals entirely, with critics' reviews due at 6 a.m. Pacific on Wednesday, Oct. 7, per Deadline. The first reactions Variety gathered put it at good, not great.

The tech-billionaire movie now has two claimants, and the one with Garfield in it opens Dec. 25. Somewhere in its 2 hours and 20 minutes, an AI agent asks, "Hey did you ever think of just unplugging us?" A beat later, it laughs the question off as a joke.

Source: Deadline, retrieved October 6, 2026.