Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman. Let that sink in for a second. The man who gave us The Amazing Spider-Man and that devastating Tick, Tick… Boom! performance is now playing the CEO of OpenAI, and the first teaser for Artificial is here to make you feel weird about the entire tech industry all over again.
Artificial is Luca Guadagnino’s take on the five-day corporate meltdown that happened in November 2023, when OpenAI’s board suddenly fired Altman as CEO, only for him to return days later after employee and investor backlash. Garfield plays Altman as a man who knows exactly how the story ends — because he lived it — but the trailer frames him as a kind of tragic figure, or at least a complicated one. The film opens with Garfield walking through a mansion, which is apparently Guadagnino’s way of saying “these people have too much money and not enough self-awareness.”
The casting is wild. Yura Borisov plays Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI co-founder whose role in the whole mess remains one of the more fascinating subplots. Monica Barbaro is Mira Murati, the interim CEO who briefly held the reins before Altman’s return. Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk, which is either perfect or the worst idea in cinema history, and Mark Rylance plays Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI” who’s spent the last few years warning everyone about the thing he helped create.
Artificial isn’t just a boardroom drama, though. The trailer teases something bigger — the AI race, the ethical questions, the sheer absurdity of a handful of people deciding the future of human civilization while arguing about stock options. Guadagnino is not a director who does subtle. He does lush, uncomfortable, borderline-unhinged cinema, which is honestly the perfect energy for a movie about the people who built ChatGPT. Artificial is heading to theaters on Christmas Day, which is a bizarre release window for a film about artificial intelligence and corporate governance, but sure, why not.
What’s most interesting about Artificial is that it’s not a documentary. It’s a dramatization of events that are barely two years old, which means the film has to balance real-world accuracy with narrative drama. The trailer suggests it leans into the drama. Garfield’s Altman is charismatic, calculating, and maybe a little bit doomed. The movie doesn’t seem interested in taking sides — it’s more interested in the spectacle of it all.
Artificial is a movie about power, and who gets to wield it, and what happens when the people in charge start to believe their own mythology. Andrew Garfield playing Sam Altman is either going to be the role that defines the next phase of his career or a spectacular misfire. Either way, Artificial is going to be the most talked-about movie of the holiday season.
Also Read: The Social Reckoning Mikey Madison Takes Down Mark Zuckerberg