Andrew Garfield is suddenly in the Oscar conversation for playing Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, a film that has already turned its New York Film Festival premiere into one of the season’s loudest awards talking points. Variety said Garfield could win an Oscar for the performance, and the reaction to the screening has pushed the film from curiosity to contender.
That attention matters because Artificial is not a loose fictional riff on Silicon Valley. It dramatizes five days in November 2023, when OpenAI’s board fired its CEO, more than 700 employees threatened to walk out, and the board then handed him his job back. In that frame, Garfield’s work is being judged not just as an impression of a real executive, but as the center of a story about a company that came within reach of a decision with much larger consequences.
Guadagnino and Simon Rich make a persuasive, often very funny case that those five days were humanity’s last real chance to pump the brakes on artificial intelligence. That gives Garfield’s performance a strange charge: he plays Altman while sitting almost constantly crisscross-applesauce, and the stillness turns into a kind of pressure, as if the character is holding the room without ever seeming to move. The comparison being made is not casual, either. The film places him beside Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates, a role that has long been used as shorthand for a performance that gets inside a figure’s surface calm and finds something unnerving underneath.
The old Hitchcock comparison also sharpens the stakes. The Academy gave Psycho four nominations at the 33rd Oscars, Alfred Hitchcock received his fifth and final best director nod, Janet Leigh was nominated for supporting actress and Perkins was left out entirely. Garfield now enters that same kind of conversation after a rapturous reception for Artificial, with Yura Borisov as his leading co-star and the film being described as Guadagnino’s best since Call Me by Your Name. The harder question is whether the praise stays with the movie or lands on Garfield himself when awards season choices begin to narrow.
For now, the answer is that Artificial has given Garfield a role that is being treated as more than a strong turn in a buzzy premiere. If the film keeps its momentum, the performance most likely to travel with it is the one at its center, and that is where the Oscar talk is already headed.
