Andrew garfield
Spider-Man may be going through another reboot but so is Andrew Garfield. The ex-webslinger is returning to his indie roots in 99 Homes and has Scorsese's epic Silence in the can. Total Film chats to the revitalised star.
From Spidey to Scorsese.
Andrew Garfield’s head is spinning, transatlantic jet lag taking its toll. When Total Film catches up with the actor, he’s just been in England for a wedding: a good friend from secondary school. “We’ve known each other for 19 years,” he says. “I was with all my old school-mates, just being ridiculous, just ripping each other.” Now 32, having decamped to LA, he really misses Britain. “It’s always going to be home. I’m going to move properly back next year,” he says. “I’m ready for some roots.”
That’s not been easy of late. Since we last saw Garfield, spinning and swinging as Peter Parker’s alter-ego in last year’s The Amazing
Spider-Man 2, he’s been on his travels, spending five months in Taiwan to shoot Martin Scorsese’s upcoming Silence. In September, he’s heading to Australia to join up with the cast for Hacksaw Ridge, the Mel Gibson-directed drama about conscientious objector Desmond T. Doss. Before either, there were months spent in Florida for his new film, 99 Homes. “It’s been very nomadic,” he nods.
It’s always been this way for Garfield; born in Los Angeles – his father Richard hails from California, his mother Lynn from Essex – he was brought over to England when he was three. It was just the first of many back-and-forths across the pond. In 2007, his breakout year, he was stealing scenes from Robert Redford as a disillusioned grad student in Lions For Lambs while impressing over here in John Crowley’s Channel 4 drama Boy A. Playing Eric, a troubled youngster released from a secure unit after serving a sentence for murder, it won Garfield a Best Actor BAFTA.
Since then, his home-grown work has included costume drama ( The Other Boleyn Girl), fantasy (Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium
Of Dr. Parnassus), sci-fi ( Never Let Me Go) and crime (the Red Riding trilogy). “I crave anything British at this point,” he says. “I’ve spent a lot of time in America recently and American stories are actually very important to me – I’m from there and my father is from there. There’s something in my blood. But also I feel very drawn into what it is to be British as well.”
Still, it was Hollywood and not British cinema that cemented his A-list status, when he was nominated for a Golden Globe and BAFTA for starring in David Fincher’s The
Social Network. Playing the pioneering Eduardo Saverin, Facebook’s co-founder along with the mercurial Mark Zuckerberg, Garfield was suggested to Fincher by the director’s old friend Mark Romanek, who’d just worked with the actor on Never Let Me Go. Here was an actor, said Fincher, with “incredible emotional access” to his “core humanity”.
Such characteristics are all-too apparent in Garfield’s latest 99 Homes, an acutely observed recession-era drama. Directed by Ramin Bahrani, it sees Garfield play Dennis Nash, a blue-collar single father who is unceremoniously ejected from his childhood home in Orlando, Florida, when the bank forecloses. Doing the ejecting is Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), a reptilian real-estate broker who specialises in repossessing homes. But when Nash winds up working for Carver, he enters a Faustian pact, selling his soul for a slice of the American Dream.
Garfield was immediately taken with the ideas. “It’s not that I’m anti-capitalism,” he says, “but what the film is definitely
questioning is the [ system] that we are now living within: this extreme, excessive, greed-based capitalism that is really not serving anyone.” The way Garfield sees it, the system is currently not working. “Not just those that can’t afford to pay their mortgage, to make bank payments, but I think it’s fucking the people who are in power too. I don’t think anyone’s particularly happy.”
To prepare, Garfield undertook a “research trip”, journeying to Florida, spending time with families facing similar problems to his character. “The majority of the families I met, the males seemed to be the main breadwinner, and the women were holding the families together,” he recalls. “And in some cases, it was the woman who was making the money, through either waitressing or washing dishes. But none of them were sleeping, not mother nor father. It just wasn’t life, it wasn’t living. It was surviving.”
Making 99 Homes also brought him closer to home. In Garfield’s youth, his father was a businessman and money was tight. “When he was an entrepreneur, in the house, we all felt – including him – a tension and a pressure,” he says. Recognising this among the families he met in Florida, Garfield telephoned his father during the shoot. “I asked him about the period of our lives when we were going through financial difficulty. It was very emotional for us both to talk about.”
Even now, Garfield admits he’s “not very savvy” when it comes to property, joking that he just has a Vespa and a surfboard. Intrinsically, he’s always understood that social trappings like the car, the house, the high-paying job – “all of that was bullshit”. He points to his later upbringing, which adjusted when his family relocated to Epsom, Surrey. His mother took up primary school teaching while his father became a coach for Guildford Swimming club. “He’s a very inspiring, motivational leader. I really think he really found his thing.” Similarly, Garfield had already found his “thing” acting in youth theatre. While he took business studies at A-level “because I wanted to have some back-up to the quote-unquote doss subjects I was doing”, his heart lay elsewhere. “Allergic” to commerce, as he puts it, “I think I was probably drawn into a field where it was very unlikely I would make any money, and be able to support myself. Of course my Dad was frightened of that. Like all parents or guardians – they just want you to thrive in the particular society we’re born into.”
He needn’t have worried. Graduating from London’s Central School of Speech and Drama in 2004, Garfield made his professional stage debut in a production of Kes that year. Marking his television bow a year later in the Channel 4 show Sugar Rush, his rise was rapid. There was more theatre, at the National; more TV, with two Dalek-themed episodes of Doctor
Who. And a storm of movies that spun him into the stratosphere. By the time he returned to the stage, in 2012, he was acting opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman on Broadway in
Death Of A Salesman. The very same year, he suited up for The
Amazing Spider-Man; an experience that now rather leaves him lost for words. “I think I’m still processing it,” he says. “It was five years I was doing it, and, yeah man, it’s really hard to sum up or to put into words yet. I’m still so close to it and it’s still not quite out of my system in a way.” He stops, starts and stutters, his brow creasing intensely, before letting out a “phew” sound that leaks from his mouth like hissing steam. A release of pressure, perhaps?
“It’s incredible I got to play that part; I've wanted to be him since I was three years old,” he continues. “But then there’s some kind of curse that I felt in actually being given the responsibility. It weighed so heavy on me because it meant so much to me, that maybe I cared too much about that character and about honouring that character. I wasn’t really sleeping. I couldn’t really enjoy it as much as I wanted to because I was working all hours of the day to try and get it to reach its potential
and be the Spider-Man that I always wanted to see and play.”
If Garfield wasn’t his usual self in the films, it hadn’t gone unnoticed. In the aftermath of last year’s Sony cyber-hack, leaked e-mails between the company’s top tier suggested executives were unimpressed by Garfield’s failure to attend a dinner with executives; moreover, mediocre reviews and middling box-office figures for the 2014 sequel (it grossed $705 million worldwide, just under $50 million less than its predecessor) meant he was considering being replaced.
Bitter? Not a bit of it; Garfield seems genuinely delighted that British actor Tom Holland is taking over the spandex suit –
“I think tom holland is perfect for spider- man” andrew garfield
firstly, for an appearance in Marvel’s Captain
America: Civil War. He cites Holland’s turn as the eldest son in 2012 tsunami disaster movie
The Impossible. “I saw that and thought, ‘This guy is the real thing.’ To be honest, I was really excited that he is going to be playing the part. I think he’s totally perfect for it. I’m really happy and glad – and I really mean that – because I get to be a fan again. I can buy popcorn and watch, and that makes me really, really happy.”
With Holland then set to appear in his own stand-alone Spidey movie, Garfield is diplomatic enough to suggest re-casting the character for the third time in 15 years is no issue. “Some people may feel it’s too soon; that it was too soon when they re-booted it the first time; [ that] it’s too soon again. But I don’t know if that’s a consideration. I don’t know if it has to be for the people who are making those decisions, because it’s always going to have an audience. People are always going to be curious. There are always going to be Spider-Man fans.”
Although the franchise introduced Garfield to co-star Emma Stone – they’ve dated on and off for the past four years – it changed his relationship to fame. “After you do a movie like Spider-Man, something shifts in the way you interact with the world because people have seen you in a movie like that. There’s just a different way they approach you; they can’t see the true you. They’re not meeting you. They’re meeting an idea of what you are.” He gets it. “I’m a culprit of it. If I bump into a childhood actor hero – like Corey Feldman – I’m going to freak out.”
The thought of Garfield getting all giddy over The Goonies star is a ticklish one. But it shows that beneath this earnest, soulful and dedicated actor there lurks the child who grew up watching Wayne’s World, Teen Wolf and Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure. As a boy, he used to spend hours with his older brother Ben making home movies with his Dad’s old VHS camera, and in his eyes, things haven’t changed so much; the job of acting is still make-believe. “You get to live all these different lives,” he says, “and walk in these different shoes.”
This was never more apparent than his recent experience, playing a 17th Century Portuguese Jesuit priest in Scorsese’s upcoming adaptation of Shûsaku Endô’s novel, Silence. A year of prep – not least absorbing “the weirdest films from the far reaches of Japan” – left him obsessed. “If I could have gone to seminary school to play this priest, I would’ve!” he smiles. “If I had 14 years to spend in Portugal, and study theology, I would!”
Yes, for this actor it is, indeed, all about putting down roots.