The actor who plays the OpenAI chief in Artificial contradicts Altman's account of spotting him mid-shoot outside his own house.
Sam Altman told Vanity Fair this week that he once stepped outside his own house and found Andrew Garfield standing there dressed as him, backpack and all. They waved, he said, and went their separate ways. Weird, but harmless.
Garfield isn't so sure it happened.
Asked about the alleged encounter during a Q&A after Artificial's premiere at the New York Film Festival, Garfield said, "If that happened, I must have blacked out." He confirmed the crew did shoot outside Altman's home at some point. But the wave, the eye contact, the moment Altman described? "We didn't see him at all that day we were shooting," Garfield said, according to Vanity Fair.
So now there are two versions of a thirty-second non-event, and neither man is backing down publicly.
Altman, for his part, had been fairly specific about it. He said he didn't initially clock that a film crew was recreating his own life a few feet from his front door, then realised it when he saw an actor who looked like him carrying the same kind of bag he carries. "We waved and went on, but it was really weird," he'd said. He's also maintained, both before and after that comment, that the wave was the full extent of any contact between him and Garfield.
Artificial is Luca Guadagnino's dramatisation of the five chaotic days in November 2023 when Altman was ousted as OpenAI's CEO and then reinstated almost as fast. Garfield plays Altman. Yura Borisov plays Ilya Sutskever, Monica Barbaro is Mira Murati, Ike Barinholtz takes on Elon Musk, and Cooper Hoffman and Jason Schwartzman round out the cast. The film had its premiere at NYFF on Monday, with Garfield, Borisov, Barinholtz and Guadagnino all in attendance.
Neon has already set up an Oscar campaign around the film, pushing Garfield for supporting actor and Borisov for lead, which tells you the studio is confident this isn't just a tech-world curiosity piece. Early reviews out of the festival have leaned into how unsettling Garfield's Altman is meant to be, less a straight biopic turn and more something closer to a warning.
Whether Altman actually waved at a man dressed as him on his own driveway is, in the scheme of things, a footnote. But it's the kind of footnote that tells you something about how strange this whole production has clearly been for the man it's about, watching his own worst week get restaged outside his front door, with or without the small talk.
Artificial opens in select theatres on December 25, going wide in January. Expect this dispute to keep trailing the film through its press run, right alongside the Oscar conversation.
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