Andrew Garfield might be playing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in the forthcoming film “Artificial,” but the actor is maintaining that he’s never interacted with the tech billionaire — despite Altman’s claim that the two waved to one another while the film was shooting outside his home.
Garfield was asked about Altman’s anecdote in a recent GQ interview, and he said he “wasn’t there.” “No, I saw that interview and I replayed it a few times to try and discern what he was actually saying, because I was very confused by that. I never had any interaction with him,” said Garfield. “I’ve never seen him in real life. We were shooting outside of his house. It was an eerie day, for sure. We were told that he wasn’t home and his security people were there. I think I saw one security guard. But, no, I never saw Sam, so he maybe mistook someone else for me. I have no idea, but I’ve never waved at Sam. I’ve never seen him. I was curious about that.”
He also added that he “didn’t have a body double,” so that couldn’t have caused the confusion, though a representative for OpenAI told the magazine that “Altman was home during the filming and reiterated that he waved at Garfield.”
Altman had previously told Vanity Fair he ran into the production filming near his house.
“There were these notices on our street that there was going to be some filming or whatever. I didn’t realize what was going on. I paid no attention,” Altman said. “And then one morning, I was walking down the street to get coffee and there were all these cameras and there was a guy dressed exactly like me with my same backpack walking so much that I felt I was in some weird glitch of the simulation or something. It was very strange. And then I immediately figured out what was happening.”
He added, “We waved and went on, but it was really weird. I mean, it’s like a strange thing to see someone that has nailed your kind of quirky mannerisms or whatever…I waved at him that one time and that was it.”
Directed by Luca Guadagnino, “Artificial” opens in theaters on Christmas Day from Neon. Set during the tumultuous time when Altman was fired and then rehired by the AI giant in 2023, the film also stars Ike Barinholtz as co-founder Elon Musk, Monica Barbaro as former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, “Anora” breakout Yura Borisov as former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and Mark Rylance as Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton.