Monica Barbaro is offering an early, tonally slippery preview of Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial,” describing a set where the director’s own description of the film seemed to change by the day. Speaking on Josh Horowitz’s “Happy Sad Confused” podcast to promote her rom-com “One Night Only,” Barbaro said Guadagnino would call the OpenAI drama a madcap comedy one day and a horror story the next. Having now seen a finished cut, she said the film genuinely lives in that in-between space rather than suffering from a muddled tone.
The Amazon MGM production, expected to premiere at the Venice Film Festival this fall, centers on OpenAI’s 2023 leadership crisis, when the board briefly ousted chief executive Sam Altman before reinstating him days later. Andrew Garfield plays Altman, with Barbaro cast as former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati and Yura Borisov playing co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Jason Schwartzman, Cooper Hoffman, Cooper Koch and Ike Barinholtz round out a cast built around Simon Rich’s screenplay.
Barbaro also weighed in on the fallout from remarks made earlier this year by her “A Complete Unknown” co-star Timothée Chalamet, who told an audience he wouldn’t want to work in an art form nobody cared about, naming ballet and opera as examples during a public conversation about shrinking attention spans. The comment set off weeks of backlash, drawing rebukes from figures including Charlize Theron and pointed jokes from Oscars host Conan O’Brien.
Barbaro, asked directly about it for what she said was the first time, offered a defense rooted in their time together on set. She said Chalamet had spoken to her about his sister’s background as a dancer and that his comment, in her view, came from a place of respect rather than dismissal.
Guadagnino himself addressed the controversy earlier this year, telling an Italian newspaper he was puzzled that a single remark could generate such an outsized reaction, though he allowed that Chalamet might have chosen his words more carefully.
Barbaro’s summer has also included stage and franchise work lined up next: a turn opposite Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo and Barry Keoghan in “Crime 101,” and a stage debut in a West End revival of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”
