Andrew Garfield Never Waved at Sam Altman

Sam Altman is such a loser. The OpenAI CEO is an amoral charisma vacuum whose best method of spinning his earth-spoiling plagiarism machine as a good thing is to hector people for caring too much about clean air and drinkable water. If he were a character in a movie, audiences would view him as both a caricature and an uninteresting one at that. He doesn’t seem deep enough to warrant a biopic, but Artificial has garnered pretty strong reviews.

Luca Guadagnino’s film is the latest in a long cycle of tech bro biopics in 2026, because that’s where we are as a society. Andrew Garfield is playing Altman, which is very generous casting he don’t deserve. In an effort to get the newspapers to say that he’s not mad, Altman claimed that he had a brief interaction with Garfield during the film’s shoot. Production took place near his house, and one day,

“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.” Altman 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.” Cute story, right?

Garfield says it didn’t happen. The actor was asked about Altman’s anecdote in a recent interview with GQ, 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.”

And no, Garfield didn’t have a body double or stand-in that day, so whatever Altman saw was not someone playing him. Either he’s lying or he just saw some dude in a backpack walking around and thought, “Yes, he must be a movie-star who’s playing me.” Either option makes him seem like a gormless dolt. It’s amazing how uncool he is, and how every effort to make himself seem aspirational just reveals that he has no personality. He’s so useless that he has to use ChatGPT to parent his own child. At least Elon Musk got to party with Iron Man.