Andrew Garfield on The Uprising, Spider-Man & Bizarre Putin Advisor Dating Rumours

Before we start, I have to say, your English accent in this was absolutely amazing. Yeah, it was really good. Okay, thanks. I'm just obviously kidding with you. I wasn't sure, to be honest. I was like, does he think I'm American? There he goes, method acting again. Okay, got it. I'm on board now. I'm on the train. To start with, I'd say you've played your fair share of heroes. There's Desmond in Hacksaw Ridge and Spider-Man, and now an ordinary man. What makes someone a hero to you? Maybe the concept of the hero is starting to become a little bit played out. In the sense of this idea that there's going to be one person that comes along and saves... It's a little egocentric, it's a little monomyth for me. So now I'm more on the kind of curiosity of what it takes to make actual change and save... save ourselves and save people, and it feels much more like a community effort. So I feel like it's more of a genius myth that I'm looking at rather than a hero myth. And there's a great mythologist called Michael Mead who talks about this. I really, really like him. But he's like, change isn't going to come from on high. Change is going to come from everyone coming from their innate genius and bringing that to the centre of the village. And that's when heroic change happens. Yeah, definitely. I mean, as Patti Smith said, people have the power. Yeah, arguably. Your first acting job was air-guitaring with a Dorito. And I wondered what 19-year-old Andrew would think of your filmography today. He would be like, there's no way you did all that. Yeah, I didn't have any kind of illusions that I was going to make a career out of this. I was so happy to be able to pay my rent and have flatmates and just do theatre and Doritos commercials for the rest of my life. So I feel very, very lucky and surprised at how things have gone. Your mum made you a Spider-Man costume when you were three. And I was wondering, did she make you a farm boy's outfit? Is there any other outfits she made you can expect to see for films coming up no that's funny though but she's from Essex she's from the place that the plowman is from okay a fen walker and and her family like that our history is there you know on her side hillman is her maiden name so it was all farmers and people who work the fields and the hills and you know so yeah it's if i felt a very visceral kind of ancestral connection so i would love a plowman's halloween costume i'll keep that on instagram yeah we've We've got to get you in on that. Nice. You recently said that on occasion you like to method act. I was wondering if there's ever been a time, maybe on the uprising, that someone was like, OK, maybe that's a bit too much method acting, isn't it? No, method acting's been... The word has become meaningless because it's not really what people think it is. It's not like Jared Leto putting a dead rat in a box and sending it. That's not anything to do with method acting. But method acting is a Stanislavski method. It's like living truthfully under imagined circumstances. sometimes you stay in it between takes because it helps. It helps you do your job properly and send everyone home early enough. Other times you can drop it in between takes and doesn't affect like sometimes it helps to drop it and be like I'm gonna do it give me three seconds I'm gonna get back and then that's all method acting. But then you have the extreme version I guess is what Daniel Day-Lewis, but Daniel Day-Lewis' method is Daniel Day-Lewis' method. I don't have any, I think it's awesome and there's times where I've tried that and there's times where everyone finds their own own thing but on this no i think like everyone was really devoted to the work and we were laughing a lot it was a really fun set but then when it was time to shoot you were all locked in and you were all living as the characters as much as you possibly could definitely definitely you talk talk about laughing at being a fun set that bit with the mud were you laughing through that i don't know i thought a really important moment it was like you know the big transformation of the character at the end so it felt like i had to really bring it obviously the robin hood vibes and stuff if you could steal one thing from any billionaire with no consequences who are you robbing what are you taking that's funny i don't know probably some yacht and then just like let let a thousand people live on it fair play i mean a yacht's a good one yeah obviously the internet falsely decided you were a stamp collector yeah i don't know if you knew that idea about this what's the weirdest thing you've read about yourself online it wasn't online but someone A friend of mine said to me, hey, just so you know, this was like years ago, I was at a dinner party the other night, and they, in LA or whatever, and they were like, yeah, someone said that you were dating one of Vladimir Putin's advisors. And I'm like, um, that's insane. Anyone can say anything, and it becomes true. Yeah, yeah, the whispers of just love. It wasn't true, by the way. Yeah. I wasn't dating him, as far as I know, Putin. Amazing. Well, thank you so much. I really liked the film, and yeah, hope the rest of the journey is good. Cheers.