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Charm, Then Doubt, Andrew Garfield Premieres Artificial at NYFF
The actor brings Luca Guadagnino's OpenAI drama to Alice Tully Hall and leaves the carpet a little wary of the machines
Andrew Garfield used to think Sam Altman seemed great. Then he spent months studying him. On Monday night, at the world premiere of Artificial inside Alice Tully Hall, he told reporters how that changed.
The film is Luca Guadagnino's account of OpenAI, and Garfield plays its chief executive. The story builds to the stretch in 2023 when Altman was pushed out of the company and then brought back. It had its world premiere at the 64th New York Film Festival, after a stretch when it was not clear who would release it at all.
Guadagnino walked the carpet with the screenwriter Simon Rich and much of his cast. Deadline's premiere gallery shows Yura Borisov, who plays the OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, along with Ike Barinholtz, Billie Lourd, Jason Schwartzman, Will Price, Nicholas Hamilton and Will Angus. Cooper Hoffman, who plays Greg Brockman, came too. Monica Barbaro, cast as the former chief technology officer Mira Murati, did not attend.
The Man Who Changed His Mind
Garfield has played real people before. He was Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network and the composer Jonathan Larson in Tick, Tick... Boom. Speaking to Variety on the carpet, he said his first impression of Altman came from watching him testify before Congress. Back then, Garfield said, Altman struck him as honest, open about regulation and easy to like. Learning more about the man complicated that picture.
He described spending two to three months with footage and recordings of Altman to prepare. He also said the shoot kept running into the news, with fresh stories about the risks of artificial intelligence arriving almost daily. He came away wanting the film to push harder, not softer.
"We need to shine the light as bright as possible at the nooks and crannies of people we're giving all of our autonomy and power to," Garfield said.
We need to shine the light as bright as possible at the nooks and crannies of people we're giving all of our autonomy and power to.
He was not without sympathy for the man he plays. Garfield told Variety he could imagine how strange it would be to see a version of yourself depicted on a screen. He said he felt real compassion about that.
A Film Nobody Wanted, Then Everybody Did
The road to Lincoln Center was not smooth. Amazon MGM Studios was set to release Artificial and then let it go when it was nearly finished. Variety reported the move came after Amazon signed a large partnership with OpenAI. Neon picked the film up and will open it in theaters on December 25. Deadline lists the British release for January 22, 2027.
That history made the premiere feel like an event. The festival's artistic director, Dennis Lim, told Variety that the film's plans had been genuinely up in the air before New York claimed it. Guadagnino has a long record here. Call Me by Your Name, Bones and All, Queer and After the Hunt all played earlier editions. When the festival opened this season, we noted that Artificial was one of the world premieres everyone was watching for.
"This is a film that deals with a very pressing situation," Lim told Variety.
The cast around Garfield is deep. Barinholtz plays Elon Musk. Mark Rylance plays the computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, and the Awards Watch review notes that the film opens not at OpenAI but in Hinton's lab at the University of Toronto, with Borisov's young Sutskever. Chris O'Dowd, Zosia Mamet and Cooper Koch are also in the ensemble.
Borisov admitted he was nervous. He told Variety that watching the film with an audience for the first time felt like waiting for a newborn to take its first breath.
The Morning After
By Wednesday, Garfield's carpet comments had become their own story. In a second Variety piece drawn from the premiere, he said playing Altman had pushed him to stop using ChatGPT, which he had treated as a research tool.
"I got a bit scared," he told Variety. "I felt a little mistrusting of the technology. It feels like the people who are encouraging us to use the technologies don't exactly know its capacities themselves. That feels a little irresponsible, to me personally."
He was clear that he does not think his own profession is finished. "I don't think actors are going to be rendered useless," he said. "The soul of humanity is the soul of humanity."
Reviews have been strong. Awards Watch gave the film a B plus and called Garfield's performance diabolical. Variety's Clayton Davis has floated him as a contender in the supporting actor race.
It has been a big season for films about the men who built the internet. Aaron Sorkin brought The Social Reckoning to Union Square only days ago, a sequel of sorts to the film that made Garfield a star. On Monday night he was back on the other side of the story, playing the founder this time, and asking the audience to look a little closer.