🎧 Andrew Garfield Played Sam Altman. Then Came the Peasants’ Revolt

In the span of about a minute, Andrew Garfield might go from jokingly complaining about having to close a window for the sake of getting good podcast audio to talking about Chaucer in actual late Middle English — a language they really considered using in his new film The Uprising before deciding against it. 

With anyone else, this might all sound like rambling — in our conversation on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, we also talk about the agriculture of 14th-century England, Robin Hood, how to quit social media (for two weeks, at least) and even a recent Atlantic article about AI. But when it’s Andrew Garfield talking, it feels like the natural consequence of being an actor, slipping into different worlds, becoming different people and learning a whole lot in the process. 

Garfield is especially busy turning into different people onscreen this year. Just a few weeks after his children’s film The Magic Faraway Tree hit theaters, he’s now starring in The Uprising, a historical thriller from director Paul Greengrass about Britain’s Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Next month, he’ll be at the New York Film Festival with Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, playing OpenAI founder Sam Altman (and yes, that’s partly how he wound up reading that Atlantic article). Not long ago, he wrapped production on Wild Things, an upcoming Apple TV series in which he plays one half of the Las Vegas duo Siegfried & Roy opposite Jude Law. 

He’s well aware it’s probably time for a break. “It was a very, very rare year where a few things came along at the same time that I really didn’t want to not do,” Garfield, who turned 43 last month, says. “The different productions all worked really, really hard to make sure that I could create a schedule that allowed the three of them to coexist in my world, and I’m very grateful for that — but I definitely kinda pushed myself beyond what felt healthy.”

What turned out to be a real blessing, Garfield says, was going straight from playing AI billionaire Altman to his character in The Uprising, a peasant who identifies himself only as Ploughman and joins a rebellion against the wealth-hoarding nobility. “It was great medicine,” Garfield says, of shaking off Altman by traveling into the past. But there’s also more connecting the two characters than you might imagine. 

“I think they both feel like very current cultural figures,” Garfield, who was born in Los Angeles but grew up in England, tells me. “They’re literal polar opposites of the ‘what-it-is-to-be-a-human’ spectrum right now — power and the lack thereof, authority and the lack thereof, control and lack of control. One is at the mercy of the other. I’m really, really glad I started with Sam and then I could respond with Ploughman.”

Hear much more from Garfield on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, which also includes my recap with Christopher Rosen about a busy weekend of film festivals from both Venice and Telluride — plus everything to know about Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s shocking A24 doc on infamous Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. I got the details on that surprise Telluride screening from Chris, and we also discussed the other big winners from the fests and why so many people walked out of theaters crying (Oprah included!). We’re heading to the Toronto International Film Festival later this week, so this awards season is only going to get busier and more dramatic from here.