British actor is out on the promotional trail for his latest film “The Magic Faraway Tree” and has commented on playing controversial OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino‘s biopic “Artificial.” And he’s quite well-aware of the damage the company and technology have been doing to society.
Garfield, who previously was involved as a main cast member of David Fincher‘s Facebook film “The Social Network,” isn’t a stranger to the world of tech-bros and has recently spoken about portraying Altman and the project in a profile piece at Esquire Magazine, where he shared his impression of the AI technology and the executive, along with his process of inhabiting the role.
“I don’t know Sam Altman. I’ve never met him. I was going off of the script and court transcripts and interviews and research, and we were telling a story. But I think anyone who takes on that level of responsibility for a company or a technology that you know is going to do a hell of a lot of damage to the soul of humanity [must have] a certain ability to dissociate,” Garfield said in a biting and accurate assessment of the AI industry.
During his usual acting process, Garfield had to seek elements of Altman within himself, including traits he might rather reject to put on the screen, “There’s something there for me to integrate, because I’m so afraid of being it. But then the argument is that if we weren’t all less rejecting in the first place, less ‘that’s not us,’ then Donald Trump wouldn’t have been voted in twice, and Nigel Farage wouldn’t be anywhere near a position of power. Whereas if we go, ‘Ok, interesting, where am I [in a] wannabe fascist, grifter, opportunist, power-hungry, ethic-less, spineless f***ing pig?’ We can identify that this is the bad part of us. We know this in ourselves.”
You may remember that “Artificial” had originally been at Amazon MGM Studios, only for the Jeff Bezos-owned studio (also deeply involved in the AI industry) to be dumped and then later acquired by NEON. Monica Barbaro, Yura Borisov, Mark Rylance, Ike Barinholtz, Jason Schwartzman, Zosia Mamet, Cooper Hoffman, Chris O’Dowd, Cooper Koch, and Billie Lourd are also on the film’s call sheet.
Interestingly enough, Garfield’s next film, “The Uprising,” from writer/director Paul Greengrass, was revealed by Focus Features as being a Robin Hood origin film out of the blue, ahead of the film’s theatrical debut on September 10. We’re still waiting on NEON to give “Artificial” an official release date, so stay tuned on that front.
