Ike Barinholtz is reportedly set to star as Elon Musk in a new film about artificial intelligence, led by Challengers director Luca Guadagnino.
The 48-year-old earnt a Primetime Emmy nomination for his performance as creative executive Sal Saperstein in The Studio last year, and has featured in other films including Suicide Squad (2016) and Snatched (2017).
He also starred opposite US actor and comedian Mindy Kahling in the hit TV Series The Mindy Project between 2012 to 2017.
Deadline now reports that Barinholtz is in talks to take on the role of Musk in new film Artificial , an AI-themed film created by Amazon-MGM studios.
Details of the movie’s plot have so far been kept under wraps, but the project has apparently also cast Anora actor Yura Borisov, along with Andrew Garfield and Cooper Koch.
Early reports speculate that it will follow a tumultuous time at artificial intelligence company OpenAI in 2023, when CEO Sam Altman was fired and rehired within days.
Musk co-founded the company, now most widely known for ChatGPT, in 2015 alongside Altman, but expressed discomfort about the effects of the technology and the direction the company was taking.
The project, which was announced last month, will be produced by Heyday Films’ David Heyman and Jeffrey Clifford, as well as Jennifer Fox. The script for Artificial is written by Saturday Night Live writer Simon Rich.
Barinholtz’s performance in The Studio, which was co-created by Seth Rogen and his long-time collaborator Evan Goldberg, received critical acclaim.
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In a four-star review, The Independent’s chief TV critic Nick Hilton wrote: “Rogen is on great form, but the best lines are offered to Barinholtz’s Sal. ‘I hope this doesn’t sound crass,’ he tells a writer pitching a Kool-Aid script, ‘but I feel like I just got double-stuffed by Walt Disney and Aaron Sorkin’.”
He added: “The Studio wastes scant time on interiority. Its characters have little or no life beyond the walls of their decadently revamped office. This is about monomania: personal and societal.
“But Rogen and Goldberg (and their team of writers) deliver a comedy that is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and even if it’s short on tenderness or social critique, it has that big, bustling kinetic energy associated with the high points of knockabout cinema. Television’s occupation of film’s traditional territory might not be over, but perhaps this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
A release date for the film has yet to be confirmed.
