Garfield Denies Waving at Sam Altman: 'I Never Had Any Interaction'

Andrew Garfield says he "never had any interaction" with Sam Altman while playing him in the film "Artificial" — directly contradicting the OpenAI CEO's claim that the two waved at each other outside his home.

Garfield addressed the discrepancy in a recent GQ interview. He said he watched Altman's earlier account several times and still couldn't make it add up.

"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," Garfield said. "I've never seen him in real life. We were shooting outside of his house. It was an eerie day, for sure."

What happened outside Altman's house?

Garfield said the production was told Altman wasn't home during the shoot, and that security personnel were on site instead. "I think I saw one security guard," he told GQ. "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."

The actor also ruled out one obvious explanation: he "didn't have a body double."

OpenAI isn't backing down. A representative for the company told the magazine that "Altman was home during the filming and reiterated that he waved at Garfield."

So we have a he-said, spokesman-said standoff. The stakes are a wave.

What did Altman originally claim?

Altman first told the story to Vanity Fair. In his version, he stumbled onto the production by accident on his own street.

"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."

He said he "immediately figured out what was happening," and 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."

A man sees his double on his own sidewalk and calls it a glitch in the simulation. Garfield sees no one at all. Both accounts can't be right, and neither man is budging.

When does 'Artificial' arrive?

Luca Guadagnino directs. Neon releases the film in theaters on Christmas Day.

The story is set during Altman's chaotic 2023, when OpenAI's board fired him and then rehired him within days. The cast runs deep:

• Ike Barinholtz as co-founder Elon Musk
• Monica Barbaro as former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati
• "Anora" breakout Yura Borisov as former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever
• Mark Rylance as Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton

If the wave dispute is any guide, the film's subject and its star have already produced better drama offscreen than most scripts manage in two hours. Christmas Day will show whether Garfield's Altman feels as strange on screen as the real one apparently did on his own street.