Andrew Garfield's time as Peter Parker came to an underwhelming end when Sony Pictures scrapped plans for The Amazing Spider-Man 3, The Amazing Spider-Man 4, and Sinister Six.
Tom Holland took over the role for Spidey's MCU debut in 2016's Captain America: Civil War and Garfield was left with no other choice but to move on from what had been a dream gig.
Talking to Ryan Reynolds for Variety's Actors on Actors, the actor looked back on being brought back into the fold for Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021. For Garfield, it meant getting to finish what he'd started close to a decade before when he first suited up as the spectacular superhero.
"It's not that I missed it. It felt undone, it felt undone for me, like I imagine you've felt with your version of that. It was just very gratifying, it was very like. Y'know, it's like you're invited to a party and then the party ends slightly prematurely than you wanted it to end, and then you're like, I've gotta reckon with being disinvited to this party."
It's so funny that it's been prompted by this very... But not funny at all because it's like the three-year-old - one of the first photos of me as a three-year-old is in a Spider-Man costume that my mother made out of felt. So it's f***ing, like, it is primal and I'm like, 'Oh my god this person, this character, it means so f***ing much to me.'"
"But coming back, and Amy Pascal reaching out and asking me about it, it was like, yeah, being re-welcomed to the party. And it could be a party finally because - kind of what you said about Deadpool being more of an adjacent, peripheral, like the more scarce character. There was something so soothing about it being a playpen for the first time, for me and Tobey. The pressure was on Tom [Holland]. Tom had to hold that universe together."
While Spider-Man: No Way Home's production was unique (it was filmed during COVID which meant shooting primarily on green screen), Garfield went on to express his excitement and gratitude to have worked with filmmaker Jon Watts.
He also likened the experience of sharing the screen with Maguire and Garfield as akin to a "Spider-Man support group."
"It was a beautiful thing to genuinely feel like you were a support of a Spider-Brother, and I do mean that sincerely. It was a genuinely lovely. And Jon Watts, such a great director. He was so loose, he was so relaxed. I was like, 'So what are we gonna do about what's on the page? Because we need to work on it.' And he's like, 'Yeah, yeah, we'll work on it.' And it's like, 'Ok, but when?' He's like, 'Well we'll improvise a lot.' And I'm like, 'Great. Great! Really?'"
"It was beautiful. It was suddenly like oh, we have an opportunity that no one's ever had where it's like a Spider-Man support group. What does that look like, let's really go down to the nuts and bolts and the studs—what could that look like? What's the dynamic that we could build that is completely specific and unique to these particular Spider-people."
While not confirmed, the expectation is that Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars will see Maguire and Garfield take on key supporting roles as their respective versions of the web-slinger.
It's also been widely reported that Spider-Man 4 will feature the returns of both actors for another Multiversal adventure. While original plans called for that to be a street-level story, it being sandwiched between the next Avengers movies appears to have changed things.
Check out the full conversation with Garfield and Reynolds in the player below.