The fact Sam Altman is gay isn't much of a plot point in Artificial, the forthcoming movie The Hollywood Reporter calls a "riveting" look at the Open AI CEO's "sociopathic madness" and a "two-decade chronicle of machine learning and technological heedlessness."
But out gay director Luca Guadagnino also doesn't exclude Altman's sexuality from his new film, which had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival Monday.
While it remains in the background for most of the movie, his orientation is revealed subtly by actor Andrew Garfield, THR reports: when he "sweetens his voice and shoots the briefest of slutty glances at a hot blond waiter while ordering vodka shots." And there's a scene in the trailer, as Out reported last month, where we see Altman stroll through his secluded Napa compound past shirtless men in speedos, draped about his pool, chatting and chilling out.
“As much as AI belongs to a world of mathematics and computers, it is still generated by people and exists in space of their interaction,” Guadagnino said in a conversation with his stars on stage at the festival.
Reviewer David Rooney calls Guadagnino and his production team "diabolically clever" for how Garfield portrays Altman, calling him the “demon twink” archetype. "Whatever sorcery the makeup or effects department has performed to put the glint of sociopathic madness in Garfield’s eyes, it works."
The filmmaker's original choice to use prosthetics to make Garfield resemble Altman reportedly was unsuccessful. "Totally ridiculous," Guadagnino told THR in October. Asked about it on the red carpet Monday night, Garfield laughed about that failed experiment, and revealed he instead relied on a combination of classic acting technique and crowdsourcing.
“When you’re first learning about acting, one of the techniques, Stanislavski, is you go through the play and you see what this person says about other characters. You see what other characters say about him,” Garfield told THR. “So I tried to speak to as many people as possible who know Sam or who have experiences and interactions with Sam to glean more of an objective, moral side, looking in point of view. Everyone is an unreliable narrator. I felt like I needed to absorb as much as possible, put it in the cauldron, put it in the pot, put it on simmer and then [use] my own instincts and interpretation and point of view, because any other actor would have played it differently. I know that I needed to play it in the way that I wanted to play it.”
Screenwriter and Saturday Night Live alum Simon Rich told Deadline he wrote the screenplay as a “last ditch effort to warn mankind" about AI he said, "and I hope to God that a couple of people pay attention.”
Ike Barinholtz plays Elon Musk in the film, and told the festival audience that he had “very complicated opinions” about Musk before portraying him. “’It’s not about you loving Elon,'" he recalled Guadagnino telling him, "'but finding what Elon loves about himself.’”
But the Musk we meet in Artificial is an earlier version of the richest man on the planet, according to Barinholtz. “This is not Musk at the RNC with a chainsaw," he said. "This is him in 2014, when a lot of people were like, ‘This guy’s gonna save us.'"
As Out reported in June, the latest movie by the director of Challengers, Queer, Call Me By Your Name and After The Hunt, was dropped by Amazon MGM Studios after announcing a $50 billion investment in Altman's OpenAI earlier in the year. Amazon is, of course, famously owned by Altman's tech billionaire bro Jeff Bezos. “The concept of a conflict of interest is a very important, let’s say, elephant in the room here,” as Guadagnino told THR.
Artificial's new distributor, Neon, plans a limited theatrical release in the United States on Christmas Day, with a wider expansion in January 2027. Check out the trailer below!
- YouTube youtu.be
