Artikel. Andrew Garfield
Boy Wonder: Andrew Garfield
- Senin, 03 Agustus 2015
- Movies
The bullied teenager who turned into the superstar of Hollywood's biggest franchises, Andrew Garfield's life reads like a comic-book. As he prepares to transform, the Spider-Man actor opens up on his troubled past, riding the rapids of fame and getting in bed with Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan.
Andrew Garfield is in the rapids, and he doesn't want to be in the rapids. I know this because he's just said it. "I'm in the rapids," he says, leaning nervously over a camomile tea in the basement restaurant of Frank Lloyd Wright's twirly-whirly Guggenheim Museum on New York's Upper East Side, "And I don't want to be in the rapids!"
By "the rapids", Garfield is referring to fame. For the 28-year-old Anglo-American (his father is American, his mother's from Essex) who was once known for delivering delicate performances of twitch and ache in TV standouts such as Boy A and Red Riding, and for providing the rapid-fire badinage of The Social Network with a beating heart, is soon to become the face of a billion-dollar mega-brand by starring in the title role of this summer's blockbuster reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man. On screen, the Garfield-Spidey matchup is an inspired concoction, with Garfield bringing the kind of busy febrile energy to the role that makes Tobey Maguire'sprevious incarnation look, frankly, a little stoned. Off screen however, Garfield's formerly anonymous existence has suddenly been hit by "the rapids", and with them a roaring new reality that encompasses everything from paparazzi photos of his downtown lip-locks with Spidey co-star Emma Stone, to the nightly fan floods outside the Broadway theatre where he's currently playing Biff in Death Of A Salesman, to media attention of any kind, to this very interview.
In fact, we haven't even begun the interview itself for this very reason. We're still in the pre-interview section of the interview. Here, in casual urban camouflage (distressed hoodie, denims, trainers), Garfield hops about restlessly on his seat, his face mostly frozen in the familiar default smile that plays like a wound on celluloid, while his hands are always reaching, always scratching and stroking, as he explains that fame is a corrupting phenomenon and "a scary thing, because there's something addictive about recognition and validation, because that's the currency for all actors". And furthermore, he continues, he was on Google this morning, in his New York apartment, and just about to click on a search for himself when his dog, a mongrel terrier mix, leapt up and put a paw on his clicking hand, as if to say, "No! Don't do it!" "And I looked at him and said, 'All right. You're right.' And I didn't."
Later, his Spider-Man director Marc Webb will say, "I think Andrew's a little freaked out by all the attention, and he's very protective of his privacy. But he's a smart guy, and he works hard. He'll be fine."
"I wish I didn't have to engage with it," says Garfield. Meaning fame. Meaning everything that's not acting. Meaning this interview. And then he asks, "You, for instance, do you even like doing these?" Struck by his candor, and by his soft and tremulous little-brother-that-I-never-had-ness, I tell him that, actually, I prefer the oldies -Kirk Douglas, Robert Duvall, Shirley MacLaine - because they generally seemed to know stuff, and have a real world-view, whereas the young ones, well, you know yourself. There's a moment of tension. A little pop at the back of his busy, whizzy, 28-year-old eyeballs. And then suddenly his shoulders drop, and he lets out a huge sigh and says, "I'm so glad you said that! I get it! That's good to know!" I think he means that he's an oldies fan, too, and that it's good that we're both on the same page (his heroes are Robert Redford, Peter Mullan and veteran director Mike Nichols). He says that we can begin the interview itself, but he warns me, with a self-mocking chuckle, that he won't say anything that's in any way personal or revealing about himself, his past, or his present life.
"Go for it!" he says, beaming. "Shoot! I'm going to tell you everything! [laughs]"
Hall H at the San Diego Comic-Con International, on 22 July 2011. A teaser trailer and a so-called "sizzle reel" of footage fromThe Amazing Spider-Man is screened before 6,500 comic-book devotees. It's a potentially tricky crowd, interspersed with a hard-core following of Tobey loyalists and "Andrew Who?" dissenters who have taken to the blogosphere in protest ever since the franchise reboot and the casting of Garfield was announced (Garfield, in 2010, beat a plethora of up'n'comers for the part, including Jamie Bell, Anton Yelchin and The Hunger Games'Josh Hutcherson).
The sizzle reel skims lightly through the film's dramatic arc and introduces Garfield as Peter Parker in sensitive yet individualistic James Dean mode, with a camera slung around his neck and a frown on his forehead, unwilling to bend to the school bully yet unable to beat him. A knockout seduction scene soon follows between Garfield's Parker and his high-school sweetheart, Gwen Stacy (Stone), where they banter by the lockers, they flirt and they connect, then the camera just sits there in front of Garfield's smitten visage, Coldplay swells on the soundtrack and you suspect that Garfield might have one of the most empathetic faces in the history of motion pictures.
"You look at Andrew's face and you cannot help but feel connected in a deep way," observes Webb. And certainly Garfield was the emotional anchor point for his two previous high-profile films, Never Let Me Go and The Social Network. Remember him in the latter, as Eduardo Saverin, absorbing quietly and stoically a litany of passive- aggressive insults from Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg until he explodes in a delicious computer-smashing release? Or in Never Let Me Go, sweet-faced and idealistic to the end, hoping for a reprieve from death, and believing in it, until, again, the closing-reel meltdown?
Back at Comic-Con, the sizzle reel is carefully ticking the traditional Spidey boxes. There's the spider bite, the transformation montage and the first emergence of the fully clad Spider-Man, who comically humiliates a dim-witted carjacker. Here, too, with his lithe and wiry physicality, it seems that Garfield is a boon for the franchise. A former school gymnast, with the physique to prove it, he tends to lead with his body rather than with dialogue. Indeed, his movements in Spider-Man proved so idiosyncratic, and so difficult to emulate, that Webb found it near impossible to use a stunt double in a suit for anything other than the most death-defying shots.
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