Andrew Garfield is trading Spider-Man’s suit for a Silicon Valley hoodie. The new trailer for “Artificial” drops the actor into the November 2023 crisis that briefly cost Sam Altman his job, when OpenAI’s board fired the CEO and rehired him a few days later.
Altman, 41, was back within a few days and still runs the company — but the film zeroes in on those chaotic few days when his future, and the company’s, hung in the balance.
Luca Guadagnino (“Challengers,” “After the Hunt”) directs from a script by former “SNL” writer Simon Rich. It’s Garfield’s second turn as a tech-world figure, 16 years after he played Facebook’s Eduardo Saverin in “The Social Network.”
Garfield told Esquire U.K. he built the performance from court transcripts and research and has not met Altman. He says, “Anyone who takes on that level of responsibility for a company or a technology that you know is going to do a hell of a lot of damage to the soul of humanity [must have] a certain ability to dissociate.”
The supporting cast is stacked. Yura Borisov, the “Anora” actor nominated for an Oscar in 2025, plays co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Monica Barbaro is interim-CEO-turned-scapegoat Mira Murati, and Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk, another OpenAI co-founder. Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, and Mark Rylance round out the ensemble.
“Artificial” premieres at the New York Film Festival in October and opens in select theaters Dec. 25, before expanding everywhere in January.