Andrew Garfield’s bitter first taste of Hollywood: “People hated it, to be honest”
When Andrew Garfield arrived on the set of his very first major Hollywood production, he could have been forgiven for pinching himself. After all, at the first time of asking, he’d been cast opposite three of the most enduring movie icons of the last 50 years.
Unfortunately for the young Brit, though, his first taste of Tinseltown turned sour when the film, Lions for Lambs, was released in November 2007. It was resoundingly rejected by critics, who chastised it for being little more than a series of political lectures masquerading as a traditional narrative. No amount of star power from the leading man/director Robert Redford, or his co-stars Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise, could rescue the film from the biggest sin in the entertainment industry: being boring.
It was a bit of a rude awakening for Garfield, who’d been thrilled to land his big-screen debut alongside such legends. As it turned out, he never actually shared the screen with Cruise or Streep — their stories played out in a different thread altogether. However, he did shoot a large amount of material with Redford, who played a college professor trying to convince Garfield’s disillusioned student to re-engage with his class, and imagined it as his ticket to the big time.
At that stage of his life and career, Garfield was so inexperienced that he had never considered the idea that Lions for Lambs wouldn’t be rapturously received. He knew the script, which interrogated the war in Afghanistan from three different angles, was “worthy”, and he told the Los Angeles Times that he believed, “This is literally going to define our time.” Instead, he watched in horror as the scathing reviews rolled in, and the movie struggled to gain much of a foothold at the box office. “The film didn’t do well at all,” he ruefully noted. “People hated it, to be honest.”
To make matters even more confusing for the young man, the same month that Lions for Lambs hit cinemas, he also starred in the Channel 4 TV movie Boy A. That low-budget British film was lavished with all the plaudits Garfield expected from Lions for Lambs, despite its bleak subject matter and comparative lack of star power.
Garfield wound up winning a Bafta award the following year for his nuanced portrayal of a man struggling to re-enter society after 14 years in a Young Offender’s institution, and it was this performance that truly put him on the map in Hollywood, instead of the one opposite the ‘Sundance Kid’ himself.
In the end, Garfield learned an important lesson from the polarised reaction to Lions for Lambs and Boy A. He was shown, in the most painful way, that “you can’t second-guess these things”; in essence, you can’t predict what is going to connect with people, and aligning yourself with beloved box office titans won’t help if the material they’re working with isn’t up to snuff. If anything, in that situation, the calibre of the cast will make people react much more harshly if the movie isn’t a classic.
Within two years of Lions for Lambs, Garfield starred in Never Let Me Go and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, but it wasn’t until the 2009 Facebook origin story The Social Network that his expectations for a film lined up with reality for the first time. He admitted that the negative response to Lions for Lambs stuck with him more than it should have, but the success of David Fincher’s modern masterpiece meant he was finally able to leave that bitter experience in the past.
“What happens after you make a movie can’t really matter, but that’s easy to say, more difficult to practice,” he concluded. “The Social Network was the first time I’ve been able to come away from the process deeply gratified and fulfilled.”
