Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman in first trailer for ‘Artificial’
Luca Guadagnino's OpenAI drama lands on Neon this Christmas after a very public studio exit
A basement full of machine guns is not where most biopics choose to introduce their subject. But that's exactly how Luca Guadagnino's Artificial opens its first trailer, with Andrew Garfield's Sam Altman descending a staircase into an arsenal before delivering a monologue about industries collapsing and countries falling.
The footage, released Tuesday by Neon, follows Garfield's Altman through an eerily normal OpenAI workday that curdles into something colder.
Garfield's character describes opening "Pandora's Box" together with his colleagues, framing what follows as inevitable. It's a tone closer to psychological thriller than corporate drama, and that appears to be the point.
Aside from Garfield, the movie has now cast actors who play real people in their respective roles: Yura Borisov stars as Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI whose board tried to get rid of Altman in 2023; Monica Barbaro as former CTO Mira Murati; and Cooper Hoffman as board chair Greg Brockman.
Mark Rylance will play Nobel Prize laureate Geoffrey Hinton, a casting role that has not yet been announced before. Meanwhile, Ike Barinholtz will take the role of Elon Musk.
As Amazon MGM Studios parted ways with Artificial in June, it was right after signing an agreement with the company which will pour in billions of dollars into OpenAI. Neon soon picked up the project and bought it for $20 million.
Following its successful run with Parasite and Anora, the new distributor already set a concrete release date: a world premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 5, then a limited US theatrical release on December 25, and a delayed UK release on January 22, 2027.
Writer Simon Rich has said the script reaches back before the 2023 leadership crisis, tracing the research relationships that built OpenAI in the first place.
