luca guadagnino cast spider-man as sam altman and the first review called it a "demon twink." we're seated.

Andrew Garfield at the 2025 New York Film Festival. Photo: Bryan Berlin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via The Hollywood Reporter, TheWrap and Gizmodo

The first wave of reviews for Artificial is in, and one of them contains the phrase "demon twink," which as far as we are concerned is the review.

Artificial is Luca Guadagnino's movie about the stretch when OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman and then took him back. Andrew Garfield plays Altman. It had its world premiere Monday night at the New York Film Festival, per Gizmodo, and the reviews landed overnight.

who said demon twink

David Rooney, in The Hollywood Reporter. Not a line from the film and not a tweet. Rooney writes that it was "diabolically clever of Luca Guadagnino, a gay director never shy about exploring queerness, to cast OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as the 'demon twink' archetype." He also says the makeup or effects team has managed to "put the glint of sociopathic madness in Garfield's eyes," and that audiences unaware Altman is gay "might pick up on subtle hints" in the performance. His bottom line: "A sneaky gut punch." He ranks it "among Guadagnino's best work."

A note on the phrase, since it is about to be everywhere: Rooney puts "demon twink" in quotation marks himself, as an archetype the casting fits, and he is describing Guadagnino's choice, not calling Altman a name. Some of the aggregation is already sloppier than that. We are being precise because the phrase is too good to waste on a misquote.

what garfield says about altman

Garfield has been doing the press rounds. He told Variety that he remembered watching Altman testify to Congress and thinking, "This guy seems fucking great. He's honest. He's transparent." Then he made the movie. He also told Variety he stopped using ChatGPT as "a fancy Google" afterward: "I got a bit scared."

TheWrap's review says Garfield "plays up how the entrepreneur was a master of seduction in all respects." Simon Rich wrote it, and the cast includes Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever, Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, Monica Barbaro as Mira Murati and Mark Rylance as Geoffrey Hinton, per THR and TheWrap.

the amazon of it all

The movie almost did not come out at all, at least not from its original studio. Amazon MGM dropped it after Amazon signed a $50 billion deal with OpenAI, as THR and Out both lay out, and Neon picked it up. It opens Dec. 25. So the gay director made a movie about a gay tech CEO, the studio with money in that CEO's company let it go, and the indie distributor is releasing it on Christmas. The plot of the release is almost as good as the plot of the film.