By VisionaryArt Editorial
Portraiture has always had a difficulty with living sitters. They can answer back, and the audience can compare. Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, which screens as a Gala at the BFI London Film Festival on 11 October, asks two actors to play men who are alive, powerful and still in the news: Andrew Garfield is Sam Altman, and Yura Borisov is Ilya Sutskever, his co-founder at OpenAI. The film has not yet been shown in Britain. From the accounts that came out of its New York premiere, the two actors solved the portrait problem in opposite ways.
Borisov: giving up the likeness
Borisov has described reaching a dead end with Sutskever a few days before the shoot. He has said that he then remembered the two of them share a birthday, took that as connection enough, and stopped trying to imitate the man. The character on screen is described as inspired by Sutskever, not copied from him.
Painters will recognise the move. A likeness can be accurate and lifeless; a portrait that gives up some accuracy can find the person. By most accounts the decision paid off. The Guardian’s Owen Myers calls Borisov ‘the heartbeat of the film’. In Variety his work has been described as possibly the performance of the year, a character who is hard to warm to at first and who wins the audience as he starts to warn about what is being built. The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney argues that Borisov’s quiet, thoughtful playing supplies the humanity without which the film would turn bitter.
Garfield: the likeness sharpened
Garfield goes the other way, towards caricature in the old sense of the word: a likeness with the features pushed. Myers calls him ‘brilliantly slimy’ and describes an Altman who ends up as a man with ‘a victim complex’. Other reviewers praise Garfield for holding charm and manipulation in the same face.
The risk in this approach is the one caricature always runs. Myers thinks Garfield plays Altman as ‘more effete than he actually is’, and finds that choice strange, since in his view there are plenty of other reasons to laugh at a technology oligarch. Exaggeration only works when it exaggerates the right thing.
The frame around them
The Guardian’s review suggests the film itself leans the same way as Garfield. Myers describes ‘clangingly obvious visual metaphors’, among them a car accelerating over a foggy Golden Gate Bridge. The score is by Damon Albarn. Mark Rylance appears as Geoffrey Hinton, the scientist the young Sutskever visits in 2003 in the hope of a job, and Monica Barbaro plays Mira Murati. Simon Rich wrote the screenplay.
Guadagnino has said that what interests him is less the technology than the people who own it, a small group with radical control over how society is organised. That is a portraitist’s interest. It also explains why the casting matters more here than in most films about real events: if the faces do not convince, there is nothing else for the argument to stand on.
What London will be looking at
Borisov received an Academy Award nomination for his supporting role in Sean Baker’s Anora. Neon, which distributed that film and now distributes this one, reportedly plans to put him forward as lead actor for Artificial, with Garfield in the supporting category. So the Gala audience will be watching a contest inside the film as well as the one in the story: two methods of playing a living person, side by side.
The festival runs from 7 to 18 October 2026.
Image: Yura Borisov at the Toronto International Film Festival, 2024. Photo: Frank Sun, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.