British-American actor Andrew Garfield made his debut in films with Robert Redford’s war drama Lions for Lambs (2007) alongside Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep and Redford himself. The same year, Garfield also starred in John Crowley’s Boy A, about a criminal seeking rehabilitation post prison sentence under a new name and identity, for which he won the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) for Best Actor. International recognition followed soon after for playing Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin to Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg in David Fincher’s biographical drama The Social Network (2010).
A trained theatre actor, Garfield is best identified in popular imagination with Spiderman in the Marvel superhero films The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), and later in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021). However, he has swung effortlessly between cinema, television and stage, independent films as well as major studio productions.
He is a two-time Academy Award nominee—for Mel Gibson’s World War II film Hacksaw Ridge (2016) and for playing composer Jonathan Larson in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s film adaptation of the stage musical Tick, Tick … Boom!, for which he won the Golden Globe for Best Actor. His other credits include Mark Romanek’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro novel Never Let Me Go (2010), Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s Silence (2016), David Robert-Mitchell’s neo noir Under the Silver Lake (2018) and Michael Showalter’s biographical film The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021). In 2022, he starred in Dustin Lance Black’s true crime drama mini-series Under the Banner of Heaven, for which he received his first Emmy nomination.
Garfield made his Broadway debut in 2012 in Death of a Salesman for which he was nominated for the Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Play. He acted in Angels in America on the West End in 2017, a role which he reprised in 2018 on Broadway, winning the Tony for Best Actor in a Play.
Garfield recently starred in John Crowley’s romance We Live in Time opposite Florence Pugh. He has wrapped production on Ben Gregor’s The Magic Faraway Tree, based on the Enid Blyton books, co-starring Claire Foy; and Luca Guadagnino’s thriller After the Hunt, in which he stars alongside Julia Roberts, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Ayo Edebiri.
Garfield was in Marrakech recently for the 21st Marrakech International Film Festival as a member of the jury headed by Guadagnino. Alongside his official commitments, he found time out to interact with the members of the international press.
In the wide-ranging conversation, Garfield spoke about the privilege of watching non-English speaking films as a jury member, being able to play a variety of characters, the calculated choices he has made in his career thanks to the early experiences of working with master actors and filmmakers, the roles that have deeply resonated with him, his collaboration with Guadagnino, his new film We Live in Time, how he balances mainstream and arthouse films, the influence of theatre and literature on his stint as a film actor and more.
Excerpts:
As a cinephile yourself, how does being on the jury extend your own taste in international cinema?
It's such a beautiful opportunity to have devoted time to non-English speaking films. It's a privilege. We have access to everything now. But, as we all know, it's so hard for us all to sit down after a long day and put on the Criterion Collection every night and find something obscure and brilliant and subtitled and have the energy. I'm on a nine to five schedule, so, I long for it. I get home after work, and I just want to watch something that is surprising and experimental and unique and completely outside of my own consciousness. But, more often than not, I will, unfortunately, just have to watch something that comforts me so I can fall asleep. So, to have a devoted week where my job is to absorb and let sink into my heart, these incredible films from around the world, made by filmmakers who are coming from such personal experience and [watching them] with these amazing jury members that I get to talk with and learn from and exchange ideas with and argue with; it's a beautiful privilege.
You have a very youthful screen presence…
I don't really think about aging. It's honestly not something I consider. I just instinctively make, what I want to make and of course, I think I look younger than I am, which has always been a blessing and a curse. But I think it's more of a blessing for me right now as I enter my 40s. I feel I can travel between ages, characters, experiences. What I feel grateful for is that I don't feel locked into one pigeonhole. And I've worked hard to make sure that I can go from Spider Man to Angels in America, to Death of a Salesman to Hacksaw Ridge to Tick Tick… Boom! And now Luca’s (Guadagnino) film. I feel very grateful and lucky that I get to play a variety of people. It's coming for all of us, the aging…
You have had the superhero kind of fame, and you also do smaller films, independent films. How have you been able to do it?
The first film I made was a Robert Redford film with Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, Tom Cruise and myself. It really ruined everything, because I then suddenly had the responsibility of my own career. I knew, from then on, that I can't just take what I'm given. I have to be selective, because now I know the experience of working with master actors, master filmmaker. So, since I was 23, I have had to discern and choose and listen for what was really deeply calling to me, rather than, ‘oh, that's going to help me get there, or that's going to give me this paycheck’. I think after working with Redford and working in theatre, I only wanted to work with the best, and I only wanted to make stories that’d hit me in the whole body.
I think what's conscious is that I like variety. I like to keep myself warm, and I like to keep all the muscles moving. I think that goes for theatre as well. I need to do a play every four or five years, although the last play I did was eight years ago. COVID blew just everything up. 2017, it’s seven years, it's about time, but that was two plays. I feel like I'm ready to do another play. There's a lot of things I want to do, and there's a lot of places I want to create. And I love making things in Europe, and I love making things in America. I love larger scale things; I love tiny things. I follow my heart.
The structure of We Live in Time is very complicated, original and unique. Did the screenplay impress you?
When I read the screenplay, I found it very touching and emotionally affecting. I think partly because of the nonlinear structure, which I enjoyed and found compelling and interesting. I love Nick Payne the writer, and I love John Crowley the director. And I thought this is quite a hard film to make, but John is very sensitive and poetic as a filmmaker, so I knew that he would be able to honor the poeticism of the screenplay.
How has the collaboration been with Luca Guadagnino in the next movie? What can you tell us about the film?
I can't say much about it, but I can say that we had a really wonderful time. And I can say that I think Luca is a master, and I have known him for 14 years. When I first met Luca, he had asked me to come and meet him at the Heathrow airport. He was on a layover with Tilda Swinton, and they were getting ready to make, I Am Love. They brought me in and asked me to play Tilda’s son. Luca has seen my work and has liked it for a long time, since I was young, and that is very touching. At that time he was known to a few people, and Tilda was endorsing him. It was very exciting, but it didn't work out. I wasn't able to participate in the film, but I wanted to. And then I saw the film, and I thought it was a sensual masterpiece, and so this [collaboration] had been a long time coming. There were a few other films we were trying to make together, and then finally, I got to be on set with him. We were both quite nervous about making something together finally, and I'm so pleased to say that our brotherhood was kind of cemented. I adore him, and I would make films with him for the rest of my life, if I'm able to.
How does the collaboration with the other actors work? When some of these great artists you’ve worked with like Heath Ledger or Philip Seymour Hoffman die, how does it affect you?
I love actors. I love actors that are better than me. I love actors that challenge me, that push me to places I didn't realize I wanted to go or were possible to go. So, I'm always looking to collaborate with the great people that I'm inspired by, that I feel drawn to. And, of course, Phil and Heath were two of the greatest. I felt like I learned so much from both of them. There's this horrific void and vacuum that any artist or person who is that big as a soul, as a creative person, leaves behind. They leave this huge chasm of absence. That does something. It's devastating, but also, in terms of how they would want their legacy to be, or how they would want to feel remembered, is for other actors, other artists, to fully live into their own talents and destiny and abilities and radicalism and expansion as artists. I think there's a responsibility to our dead, especially our dead actors and our dead artists, to live up to the kind of the work that they were doing. I still feel the spirit of Phil and Heath pulling me towards what I want to do. I do feel like it's an important relationship even now and with Mike Nichols. Mike Nichols, my mentor. He had mentored a lot of people, very gently and beautifully, and I happened to be one of them. And he's someone that I will think about when I'm reading a script and go, ‘what do you think?’ and I'll wait for a response.
What does an actor with a grounding in theatre, someone like you, bring to the screen?
I can't speak for all of us, but I can speak for myself and what I think my theater background enables is discipline, graft, craft. I. Just a pure passionate love for great writing, for keeping our attention on the story being the main character, the story being the thing that we're serving, rather than ourselves. Collaboration with other artists and actors, because you need each other so desperately on stage, because we're all going to have terrible nights, and we need our community to fill in the gaps when we're not showing up. It is tribal, it's community. I think on a film set sometimes, not all the time, it can feel more isolating, and everyone's in their own process and in their own world, then you have someone like Luca or John Crowley who rehearse, and they love the theatre and part of their intention in making a film is to create a community out of all of us, including our crew. Or Lin Manuel Miranda, obviously being one of the great theatre makers. I think I'm drawn to people, directors and filmmakers, who want to live into the more theatrical traditions of a more ‘all for one and one for all’ kind of attitude.
You recently said you don't do social media because there's no winning in that market. Is winning really important to you?
Maybe winning is not the right word. What I think [and it could change] is that it [social media] would probably take from my serenity more than give to my serenity. It doesn't seem nourishing to the work, to the life I want. I am in no way someone who wants to or does turn away from the suffering of the world, and, in fact, the opposite; I think as artists we are meant to face the suffering of the world and be a part of the healing of that suffering. But I don't know how much healing happens on social media. Maybe it does. I know it does and but there's just so much unnecessary horror to wade through to get to that healing. But I'm incredibly competitive when it comes to board games and tennis and basketball and any sport that involves competition. Some of my friends don’t want to play games with me.
You have done some very dark, complex roles. Do you struggle to leave some of these roles behind before approaching a new role?
I will only take on a role if I feel like there's some healing in it for me and for an audience. When the role follows me home or the struggle of the character lingers in me… I remember we were in the middle of shooting a scene for The Social Network where I arrive at the house I'm renting for Jesse's character and Justin Timberlake’s character answers the door. It's a scene that's full of feeling, my character feels incredibly wronged and abandoned and enraged and mistreated, and so I'm conjuring all of that up. And, you know, we do a lot of takes, and we start shooting on the Friday, and then we get halfway through the scene, and we have the weekend, then we come back and shoot on Monday, and I'm like, this is going to be hard. And I got into two altercations over the weekend. Nothing physical. Ultimately, thank God, because insurance claims would have been through the roof, and they would have had to delay shooting, because I would have probably gotten knocked out, but I found myself feeling very wronged everywhere I looked and I said to my friends, I think I need to just be in it. I need to be in a padded room for the next two days, because this is lingering, and I don't want it not to. I want to stay with it. It's a fun life. You realize that you're conjuring feelings all the time, whether you know it or not. Everything is always subjective. It's like there's no such thing as heaven and hell, but thinking makes it so. We are constantly creating our own reality. And as actors, we just get to do it consciously. So that's one part of it. But yeah, sometimes I do have to sign out of the character. Like doing Angels in America, eight shows a week of that play, I was close to a couple of nervous exhaustion, breakdowns during the run of that play, and I had to really tend to myself. I didn't miss a show, but I thought I might have to, so there are certain things that I do in order to get back to myself.
You mentioned turning forty. Does it feel like a significant milestone to you both personally and in terms of the roles you might get in the future?
Not really in terms of work, but personally, yes. In terms of work, whatever comes my way, comes my way, and whatever I'm drawn to I'm drawn to. But maybe my energy is diminishing. Slowly but surely. I look back on something like Angels in America, and I think, how I could do that today, and I don't think I'd want to. I wanted to be there when I was in my mid to early 30s. I had the vitality for it, but now there’s a shift happening. I don't think it's to do with the number. I think it's to do with just a kind of feeling. You look back, you look forward, you look where you are. What's happened so far? Is it okay? And what is it going to be now? What do I want to do? What does it all mean? You know, healthy, existential questions.
We Live in Time is a beautiful contemplation on grief. You have mentioned Mary Oliver as a poet who speaks about that kind of thing beautifully. What are some other literature icons that you feel accompany the film?
Mary Oliver's really good. I always read a lot of Rumi, but I feel Rumi taps into the eternal stuff. There an Irish poet, David White and John O'Donoghue, two people that I think are touching certain things that this film touches. John myself and Florence [Pugh] would send poems to each other throughout the shoot.
Is this your first time in the Arab world?
The only other Arab country I have visited previous to Morocco is Saudi Arabia. I am so ashamed that it's taken me this long to travel. I also feel ashamed of being a part of the human race right now in so many ways, but particularly in how divisive the propaganda machine is in every corner, in most factions. I think there's a certain Western media bias that has created a very false, minimized, reduced, reductive impression of anywhere outside of the West and it enrages me, and it hurts, and it upsets me so deeply, and it insults anyone from anywhere. I thought I was smart enough, and I had enough critical thinking, and I knew my own being enough to have avoided any kind of unconscious propagandizing, but I realized that I was as susceptible as anyone else. We're in the water. It's in the air.
I was shocked and ultimately grateful to have any preexisting notion to be blasted open and cracked open on my trip to Saudi Arabia. Every country has their problems. America and the UK, we're pretty problematic in a lot of ways. And the idea that we're not, the idea that we're some pure bastion of progress is a fallacy and deeply hypocritical. I love the fact that all of my expectations were destroyed, and I'm humbled by it and deeply ashamed that I could be a human susceptible to such things.