The “dangerous” role that devastated Andrew Garfield: “I got heartbroken a little bit”
This year sees the release of the first live-action Spider-Man movie in five years, as Tom Holland slips back into the latex and prepares to swing about New York City, saying things like “woahhh” for the fourth time. But for many fans of the prodigious web-slinger, there was one man who played him best, and that was Andrew Garfield.
Garfield played Spider-Man on three occasions, the third being more of a cameo in 2021 after the suit had been passed to Holland, and he first stepped into the Marvel world in 2012 for The Amazing Spider-Man, which represented a complete reboot of the series after a fourth Sam Raimi film with Tobey Maguire was cancelled.
The British actor was riding high from the success of David Fincher’s The Social Network two years earlier, which had brought him a Golden Globe nomination, and the decision to stick him in a spidey-suit opposite Emma Stone proved to be a masterstroke by Marvel. The film was a massive success, bringing in more than $750m at the box office, with critics praising Garfield’s performance as ‘definitive’.
But as he told Variety, Garfield had something of a mixed experience at the time, managing to cope with the pressure of leading an enormous global franchise at a relatively young age but only really understanding everything that went with it some years down the line.
On leaving Spider-Man behind, he added: “I was 25, 26, and I felt young, in retrospect. There’s something about being that young, in that kind of machinery, that I think is very dangerous. I wasn’t a teenager, but I was still young enough to struggle with the value system of corporate America. It’s really a corporate enterprise.”
After filming the second movie, Garfield took a full year off to take stock, only coming back to Hollywood in 2016 to star in the brilliant Mel Gibson war movie Hacksaw Ridge, which earned Garfield his first of two Oscar nominations.
Looking back on his time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he added, “There’s something that happened with that experience for me where story and character were actually not top of the priority list, ultimately, and I found that really, really tricky. I signed up to serve the story and to serve this incredible character that I’d been dressing as since I was 3. And then it gets compromised and it breaks my heart. I got heartbroken a little bit.”
Fans of Garfield, and especially fans of his performance in The Social Network, will be happy to know he’s signed on to play the lead in what could be a very similar experience, as he’ll be starring as OpenAI boss Sam Altman in Artificial, which will be directed by Call Me by Your Name’s Luca Guadagnino. That film will focus on Altman’s firing in 2023 and then rehiring after huge backlash just five years later.
He has also finished filming a new Paul Greengrass historical action film, The Uprising, in which he stars alongside Tom Hollander, Thomasin McKenzie and Jamie Bell. As if that were not enough, he will also appear in the colourful Enid Blyton adaptation The Magic Faraway Tree, set for UK release in the final week of March.
The film looks like a surreal fever dream, packed with impeccably accented children who sound as though they grew up in £10m townhouses in South Kensington and have never set foot in a KFC.
