The London Film Festival has a knack for putting a mirror up to the moment, and this year’s premiere of Artificial does exactly that. Directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by Simon Rich, the drama casts Andrew Garfield as OpenAI chief Sam Altman and follows the company from its early idealism through the ChatGPT boom and the chaotic boardroom episode of 2023.
Curiosity, fear, and a story still in motion
Garfield has said curiosity and fear drew him to the role. He wanted to understand the people shaping the next phase of daily life, and he did not meet Altman while preparing. That distance is deliberate: the film offers an idea of a public figure rather than a portrait signed off by its subject. OpenAI declined to comment on the project; Altman has already signaled he does not expect a tidy, accurate depiction.
The cast leans into that sense of living history. Yura Borisov plays Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder and former chief scientist whose clash with Altman over safety sits at the story’s core. Mark Rylance appears as Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called Godfather of AI. Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk, and Monica Barbaro portrays Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former technology chief. Barbaro has described the odd feeling of filming arguments that were still playing out online in real time.
For Garfield, who once played a younger Mark Zuckerberg-adjacent figure in The Social Network, the territory is familiar and newly dangerous. Tech origin stories used to feel like underdog myths. This one arrives while the companies themselves are still rewriting the ending every quarter.
Why the film lands now
Shot in 2025, Artificial arrives while debates about rogue systems and corporate accountability keep escalating. Guadagnino’s track record with intimate, stylish character studies suggests the movie will treat boardrooms and late-night reckonings as personal drama rather than a slide deck. For festival audiences, that is the draw: not another tech explainer, but a human story about power, friendship, and the cost of building something that outruns its creators.
Whether the film becomes awards bait or a conversation piece first, its premiere already marks a new phase for Hollywood’s AI era. After years of speculative thrillers about machines, studios are finally dramatizing the people who built the machines — and the public is watching both sides of that screen.