OpenAI Film Artificial Premieres at London Festival

Andrew Garfield moved along the red carpet outside the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday, October 11, 2026. The BFI London Film Festival was holding a gala for its 70th edition, and the film receiving that treatment was Artificial, directed by Luca Guadagnino. Garfield plays Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI. Reuters interviewed him there.

“I think the reason I was drawn to it was just pure curiosity and fear and really trying to understand as deeply as possible the people who are ushering us into this next phase of the world,” Garfield said.

He had named the same reasons when he took the part: curiosity, fear, and the wish to understand those people as deeply as he could. At the gala photocall he stood with Guadagnino, Yura Borisov, Monica Barbaro, Ike Barinholtz and Mark Rylance. Borisov plays Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist; after a supporting-actor Oscar nomination for Anora he was being campaigned for the lead. Barbaro plays Mira Murati, the company’s former chief technology officer. Barinholtz appears as Elon Musk. Rylance takes the part of Geoffrey Hinton, the researcher known as the Godfather of AI. The cast also includes Cooper Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Chris O’Dowd

The screenplay is by Simon Rich, an Emmy-winning Saturday Night Live writer. Artificial spans two decades, chronicling OpenAI’s origins and growth, and centers on the five days in November 2023 when Altman was fired and then rehired. It is a drama about who holds power over the technology reshaping the world. The film follows the ethical differences over AI safety between Altman and Sutskever. Sutskever trained under Hinton and left the company after his involvement in the ouster. Artificial was shot in 2025.

Reaching a London gala with that story intact had required a rescue of its own. In June, Amazon MGM Studios dropped the picture. The studio had developed and financed the project until the film was nearly finished. Its public statement said the picture would “be better served if it were released by a different studio.” The timing sat against Amazon’s multi-year strategic partnership with OpenAI, a deal reported to include a $50 billion investment to expand the company’s use of Amazon Web Services and to build custom AI models. Netflix, A24 and Focus Features passed. Neon acquired the film and moved it toward an Oscar-qualifying release. The producers were David Heyman, Jeffrey Clifford, Guadagnino, Jennifer Fox and Simon Rich. On October 5, 2026, the world premiere ran at the New York Film Festival inside Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. Six days later the same cut reached the Royal Festival Hall. That rescue is what put the finished film in front of an audience at all.

In 2010 Garfield played Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network, the film about the origins of Facebook. For Artificial he did not contact Altman and did not meet him. He worked from the script, court transcripts, interviews and research.

“I don’t know Sam and I have a lot of compassion for a person who’s my age, almost, and there’s a movie being made about him,” Garfield said. “It’s not him, but it’s an idea of what this story is and his part in it.”

Altman told Vanity Fair he was not expecting an “accurate depiction.”

Monica Barbaro remembered watching the arguments unfold on Twitter. “It’s so fascinating making a film like this when the topic is so relevant right now,” she said. “We’d be on set, watching two people argue with each other on Twitter, who we were portraying in this movie. It was really wild to have that experience. It’s exciting and it’s also really daunting because you want to be truthful, but the truth seems to change every month.”

Garfield described the people caught under that same pressure. “There’s a sense of courage and imagination and resilience these people at the top of these companies must have, the ability to withstand so much criticism and such a microscopic lens on them as people. And it’s important that we do that because we need to know who’s in power and who’s creating our new world,” he said.

Early awards heat gathered fast. Yura Borisov answered the buzz in two words. “It’s a miracle!”

Andrew Garfield spoke to Variety on the same red carpet. “So flattered that anyone is going to see this film,” he said. He told the magazine he felt proud of the work. The shoot had been intense. As talk about the picture built, he said he was flattered that people were speaking of it so nicely.

Neon set the United States theatrical release for December 25, 2026. Artificial would reach American screens on Christmas Day.