Andrew Garfield has denied ever seeing Sam Altman, let alone waving at him, despite the OpenAI chief executive claiming otherwise in a Vanity Fair cover story. The actor plays Altman in Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s film about the founding of OpenAI, which premiered in New York. Press tours usually produce polite answers and rehearsed smiles. This one produced a sidewalk mystery in which only one of the two men remembers the encounter.

While Altman remembers a friendly wave and a spooky lookalike, Garfield remembers an empty street and a very persistent search for the man himself.

Andrew Garfield has rejected Sam Altman’s claim that the two men waved at each other. Altman told Vanity Fair that a lookalike with his backpack and walk passed him outside his home. Garfield did film Artificial on that street, yet says that no wave occurred.

“I never saw Sam. So he maybe mistook me for someone else,” Garfield said in the GQ interview.

He added, “I’ve never waved at Sam, I’ve never seen him. And I was, yeah, I was curious about that.”

During the GQ interview, Garfield also recounted his attempt to meet Altman and the confusion surrounding the encounter. He said he replayed Altman’s comments several times and clarified that there was nobody double. According to Garfield, the crew had been told Altman was away, leaving him scanning windows and street corners in an eerie search, with only one security guard in sight. However, an OpenAI representative later told GQ that Altman was actually home and had waved at the crew.

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While the wave stays unproven, Garfield used the same GQ chat to point a sharper finger at tech’s biggest dreamers.

Andrew Garfield also used the GQ interview to call out tech billionaires who seem convinced they will never die. He called that mindset deluded and immature, then upgraded the verdict to infantile and cowardly. Garfield noted that dying is the scariest adventure anyone can take, and every person already holds a ticket. Fear of that ticket, in his view, drives a culture obsessed with ascending.

Garfield also noted the irony in his own argument. Younger men are steering technology that none of them can fully map, which leaves everyone standing on the same threshold of not knowing. He said that threshold is where people get interesting, though he admitted the thought cracked his brain a little in real time. Garfield finds the unknown exciting, and Sam Altman now has a fresh unknown of his own: who exactly he waved at that morning.

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What are your thoughts on Andrew Garfield disputing Sam Altman’s wave story? Let us know in the comments.