Artificial has finally put its strangest casting choice front and center. Andrew Garfield is playing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino’s new film, and the official poster makes it very clear who sits at the center of this particular tech drama.
Garfield’s Altman is presented as the face of a story about ambition, artificial intelligence and the messy human politics behind one of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies. That is already a lot for one poster to carry.
Then again, this is not a normal biopic.
Artificial dramatizes the early story of OpenAI and follows the clash between Altman and co-founder Ilya Sutskever, played by Yura Borisov. The film also brings in real-world figures including Elon Musk and AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, turning a recent chapter of technology history into something closer to a character drama.
Garfield is the obvious hook.
He is not wearing heavy prosthetics or disappearing behind a dramatic physical transformation. Instead, the film leans on movement, styling and mannerisms to make him feel like Altman. Altman himself has even described encountering Garfield during filming and being struck by how closely the actor copied his walk and appearance.
That is exactly the kind of detail that makes a casting story more interesting.
Artificial is not trying to recreate every event like a documentary. The movie takes creative liberties, and Altman has already acknowledged that. Some scenes are heavily dramatized, including a bizarre bunker sequence that does not represent his real life in any literal sense.
The point is less “this is exactly what happened” and more “what happens when ambition, money and a technology capable of changing society collide?”
That gives Guadagnino plenty of room to play.
The director, best known for films such as Call Me by Your Name, Challengers and Suspiria, is taking a very different subject this time. Artificial is written by Simon Rich, which should give the material some bite instead of turning every boardroom scene into a lecture about quarterly growth.
The film has already attracted attention for its depiction of Silicon Valley power games, especially as AI companies continue to dominate real-world headlines. The timing is almost too perfect.
There is also a strange bit of real-life casting irony here. Garfield is playing a tech CEO who has become one of the most recognizable figures in modern AI, while the actual Altman reportedly watched the film’s trailer and had some thoughts about its accuracy.
That is when a biopic gets interesting.
Artificial also arrives with the awkward afterlife of a project that changed distributors before release. Amazon MGM dropped the film, and Neon later picked it up, giving the movie a new path to theaters.
That story is almost as fitting as the film itself. A movie about a company built around disruption ends up having its own distribution drama.
Artificial opens in U.S. theaters on December 25 through Neon. By then, the central question will not be whether Garfield looks enough like Altman.
It will be whether audiences buy him as the man behind one of the most consequential tech stories of the decade.
The poster says Sam Altman.
The movie seems ready to ask what that name actually means.