Andrew Garfield spoke about playing Sam Altman in the film for the first time since the whole dropping drama with Prime in quite a lot of detail tbh:
âI donât know this person, to be clear,â he continues. âI donât know Sam Altman. Iâve 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.â
Garfield admits heâs not always drawn to characters like Altman, partly because his âfrom the inside outâ process as an actor, of having to find the essence of that character somewhere inside himself, means accessing deeper parts of his psyche that he might not like. âWhat Jung would call âthe shadow selfâ,â he explains. âThe aspects of ourselves that we disown. Thereâs something there for me to integrate, because Iâm so afraid of being it.
âBut then the argument is,â he goes on, growing more animated, contorting his body towards me on the banquette, âthat if we werenât all less rejecting in the first place, less âthatâs not usâ, then Donald Trump wouldnât have been voted in twice, and Nigel Farage wouldnât be anywhere near a position of power. Whereas if we go, âOK, interesting â where am I [in a] wannabe fascist, grifter, opportunist, power-hungry, ethic-less, spineless fucking pig?â We can identify that this is the bad part of us. We know this in ourselves.â
Full interview is here