Spider-Man: No Way Home featured the returns of Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire as their respective Peter Parker Variants, and the former has once again been given the chance to speak about that experience. SiriusXM (via ComicBook.com) caught up with the British actor and got some details from him on what it was like to work alongside his predecessor.
"He took a little bit of a sabbatical from acting for a while, much to my dismay, because I'm such a huge fan of him as an actor. He's been focusing on other things and producing and life," Garfield said. "It was so awesome to be able to be present for him being on a film set as an actor again, and especially as that character. I grew up idolizing Tobey in that role and he's such a huge part of that character for me, and just being a fan of him as an actor."
Revealing that they both spent a couple of weeks workshopping what their respective returns and dynamic would look like with director Jon Watts, Garfield recalled it feeling as if "we were kind of two friends making a little Spider-Man short film and going, 'Wouldn't this be cool?' I think he really started to remember his connection to acting as well, his love of it, as if no time had passed."
The actor also talked more about sneaking into a Spider-Man: No Way Home screening with Maguire, revealing that this was actually the first time he got to see the movie.
"If Tobey and I just kind of put on a baseball cap and wear our Covid N95 masks, we just look like a couple of white guys and that's kind of that. We're just two other white guys who like Spider-Man, and we go and we get our popcorn, and we hang," Garfield said. "I had never seen the film before. Amy [Pascal] and Kevin Feige had set up a screening for us that I wasn't able to go to because I was shooting. Tobey had already seen it, but I hadn't seen it. I was seeing it for the first time with him and with an audience. It was one of those moments that you'll never forget."
That must have been something really special, particularly as we know fans were breaking into cheers and applause when these two returning Spider-Men showed up on screen! The hope is that both Garfield and Maguire will be given the chance to play these characters again at some point, but if this was it, at least both actors managed to swing out on a high.
You can watch the full interview with Garfield below: