Andrew Garfield Reflects On His Heartbreaking Experience Playing THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN
Andrew Garfield has been making the rounds this week for his upcoming release Silence and he recently took a few moments to look back on his heartbreaking experience playing Spider-Man.
Andrew Garfield landed the role of a lifetime when he signed on to play Peter Parker in July 2010, but unfortunately after a more-than-decent start in 2012's The Amazing Spider-Man, everything promising about the new series seemed to fall apart in the 2014 sequel, which despite financial success, sent the franchise into a nosedive and ultimately back into the hands of the illustrious Marvel Studios. The move, which has been welcomed a wide majority of fans, came at a steep price to Garfield as he was left out of the new agreement with the studios opting for a much younger Spidey - later revealed to be played by up-and-comer Tom Holland.
While Garfield has since moved on to bigger and better things, including critically acclaimed dramatic turns in Ramin Bahrani's 99 Homes, Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge, and based on early word-of-mouth, Martin Scorsese's Silence (a role which will likely garner him his first Academy Award-nomination), it still seems like he'll always be a little bit haunted by his experience playing everyone's favorite friendly neighborhood wall-crawler, an experience he admits broke his heart after the failure of the second film.
Considering Garfield's unparalleled love for the character of Spider-Man, the studio's interference with the film's story as well as with his portrayal of the character was a particularly hard pill for him to swallow. “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’ve been dressing as since I was three, and then it gets compromised and it breaks my heart. I got heartbroken a little bit, to a certain degree. Not entirely.”
Adams, who plays ace reporter Lois Lane in the DC Films Universe, expressed the same sentiment to some degree as she elaborated on her disheartenment at times with how these big-budget superhero movies more often than not sacrifice character in favor of the bigger story: “I love playing her, I love everyone I work with, but sometimes it’s tricky because I feel like she’s in service of the story instead of the story serving the character. That sometimes can be tricky when you show up and you really wanna retain a character and you have to serve the story… In a perfect universe they all work together. I always wanna service the story, but I wanna feel supported in the character as well.”
Additionally, in a separate actors' roundtable with The Hollywood Reporter, Garfield, while responding to a previous comment from actor Dev Patel (Lion), went on to further expand on his immense disappointment with the missed opportunities in the two Amazing Spider-Man films:
"I love what you just said, that you were looking at a stranger and feeling like you were perpetuating something that's toxic and something that's shallow and something that has no depth, no matter how much depth was attempted. Spider-Man was my favorite superhero, my first superhero costume when I was a 3-year-old at Halloween... I was like, there's millions of young people watching who are hungry for someone to say, 'You're OK. You're seen very deeply.' And more often than not the opportunity is not taken, and it is absolutely devastating and heartbreaking because there is so much medicine that could be delivered through those films."
Check out the two separate conversations in the videos below: