Andrew Garfield names the world’s greatest living actor: “We’d kneel at the altar”
Aside from looking 25 when he’s actually 42, Andrew Garfield has plenty of other tricks up his sleeve; namely, being able to take on roles as diverse as Spider-Man, a World War II medic, someone paralysed from the neck down and now a college professor being accused of assault and do them all with equal aplomb.
He’s quietly over the past 20 years become one of Britain’s absolute best; it just seems for some reason that people don’t put him in the equation, perhaps because he seems like a pretty laid-back ‘one of us’ kind of chap rather than a Hollywood A-lister. But a glance back at his CV does lead you to realise “Wait… he’s been in some amazing films” and also “Wait… he was brilliant in nearly all of those.”
Sometimes people just end up doing what they’re supposed to be doing, though, and that would appear to be the case with Garfield, who graduated from drama school in 2004 and within three years was making a film debut alongside Robert Redford, Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep, a trio of the finest actors of all time, in Lions for Lambs.
Since then he has also quite impressively gone for quality over quantity; he isn’t an actor who will sign on to three or four movies a year, preferring to carefully choose projects of the highest standard, which led him to David Fincher’s masterpiece, The Social Network in 2010 – although Fincher changed the role he ended up playing because he had too much emotional awareness to be believable as Mark Zuckerberg. Garfield stood out and was duly nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance.
Garfield only took on two movies in four years after that, however: The Amazing Spider-Man and a sequel in 2014, preferring to do some work on Broadway and appear in music videos for the likes of Arcade Fire. But he returned in 2016 on the superb war drama Hacksaw Ridge and was rightly recognised with an Academy Award nomination.
Not only was he being feted on screen, though, he was rapidly becoming a force in theatre too, and that was reflected by his landing a Tony award for Angels in America, a play about living with AIDS in New York in the 1980s. And ironically, it was the role that saw Garfield win out over one of his all-time heroes from drama school as he told FilmIndependent: “We’d go kneel at the altar of Mark Rylance whenever we could; he’s our greatest living actor.”
Of beating Rylance, who was artistic director at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre while Garfield was at drama school, the younger man said sarcastically: “That’s right. I’m a better actor than Mark Rylance.”
Rylance is indeed seen as possibly the best actor to come from Britain in generations, knighted for his work that has seen him earn a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Oscar plus three Tony awards for his theatre roles. He has appeared in leading roles on stage and screen for more than 40 years, winning a Laurence Olivier award as far back as 1983, and more recently winning acclaim for his performances in movies like Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies and Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk.
Garfield, meanwhile, went from strength to strength, winning a ‘Best Actor’ Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination for Tick, Tick… Boom, in 2021, the Lin-Manuel Miranda-directed musical movie about an aspiring New York City-based composer.
After another fairly quiet few years, save for a movie with Florence Pugh called We Live in Time, Garfield is now back alongside Julia Roberts in a film called After the Hunt from Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino, playing a college professor who is hit with a serious allegation of sexual assault by a student, played by The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri.
