Andrew Garfield didn’t just play Sam Altman — he tried to understand him. And what he found, he says, was a man who looked like a hero on paper but carried shadows no script could fully capture. At the world premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial at the New York Film Festival, Garfield admitted he once thought Altman was ‘fucking great’, charming, transparent, the kind of figure we need in tech. Then came the realisation: the more you learn, the less certain you become. The film, which dramatises Altman’s controversial ousting and reinstatement at OpenAI, arrives with a pulse that matches the headlines. News broke daily during filming about AI risks, ethical breaches, and corporate power plays. Garfield felt the weight. 'We need to shine the light as bright as possible at the nooks and crannies of people we’re giving all of our autonomy and power to,' he said. That responsibility isn’t lost on anyone involved. Yura Borisov, playing Ilya Sutskever, called the film a newborn. 'waiting for it to start breathing.' Ike Barinholtz, as Elon Musk in his 2014 prime, joked about playing a man everyone admired before the chainsaws and Twitter chaos. But even he acknowledged the moment was pivotal: not the meme machine, but the visionary. Writer Simon Rich revealed the film’s origin wasn’t fiction, it was panic. His childhood friend Danny Selsam warned him about AI as early as 2008. They thought he was mad. Then Selsam joined OpenAI. By 2023, Rich had seen things on his screen so terrifying he feared being dismissed as a hoax. He wrote columns. No one listened. So he wrote a movie. 'It’s a last-ditch effort to warn mankind,' he said. The film itself nearly didn’t happen. Amazon MGM pulled it from their slate. Just weeks after signing a $50 billion deal with OpenAI. Altman is close to Jeff Bezos, who invited him to his 2025 wedding. Neon stepped in. Now, Artificial lands in theatres on December 25. It’s not just a biopic. It’s a reckoning. And the real Sam Altman? He hasn’t seen it. 'It will not be good as an accurate depiction,' he told Vanity Fair. But the question isn’t whether it’s true. It’s whether it matters. The film opens on Thursday. The world watches.