A few minutes across the border between Los Angeles and Ventura County sits a members-only club called Little Beach House Malibu, and in that club’s open-air dining room, on a balmy Thursday in October, an out-of-work actor sits facing the sea. Andrew Garfield – modestly bearded, dressed in white painters’ trousers, a logo-less black T-shirt, and your basic incognito-celeb baseball cap, whose brim he keeps tilting upward like the visor of a knight’s helmet – orders a cheeseburger with sweet potato fries, yellow mustard on the side, and begins to elaborate on what he’s been up to lately, which isn’t much.
“I’m in a real period of not-doing,” he says, cheerfully. “The usual aggressive, ambitious, driven heartbeat, rapping at the door has subsided for a while.”
The break he’s on now comes after 14 months of remarkable work, even by Garfield’s standards: Tick, Tick… Boom! and The Eyes of Tammy Faye. A surprise return to the role of Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home. An Emmy nomination for the TV miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven. To hear Garfield tell it, all this work has been challenging, rewarding, and unexpectedly satisfying – and all of it has been put in perspective by the loss of his mother, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2019. Over the course of a few hours in Malibu, he’ll bring up her passing again and again – not as a painful memory, but as a line of demarcation; an experience that’s broken him open in unpredictable ways, recalibrating his understanding of existence itself, and how fleeting it can be.
At some point in the future, he’s set to play Richard Branson, in a David Leitch miniseries about Virgin Atlantic’s feud with British Airways. But that’s a long way off. Whatever force has driven Garfield this far is, as he puts it, “hibernating, or taking a nap or something.” For now he’s taking time to enjoy other people’s work – he’s already binged hours’ worth of hard hitting documentaries, and has Jordan Peele’s sci-fi horror film Nope on deck for tonight. Only occasionally is he nagged by the sense that he should be doing more – like when he drives around Los Angeles, looking up at billboards showcasing other people’s projects.
“You start to go into, Well, what am I doing? Why don’t I have a billboard?” Garfield says, laughing. “It’s so stupid. It’s insane. It can be a really great fuel, but it can also be maddening.”
Did you have to carve out this time off deliberately, or did it just happen?
No. I didn’t, thankfully. I didn’t have to force my way into letting myself rest. [Bites burger] It was interesting. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, the reason for this weird peace I’ve been experiencing. I think the loss of my mum was a big thing. That cataclysm is a forever-reverberating shift into a deeper awareness of reality. Existence. The shortness of this window we have. I think that’s working on me in profound ways that I’m probably not even aware of. Combined with a lot of output – a few things coming out at the same time, things I was really happy and proud of. We’re never satisfied, really, but there was – I don’t know – a semblance of satisfaction [laughs] that I started to feel, with how Tick, Tick… Boom! turned out, with how Angels in America turned out. And actually with how being involved in that Spider-Man movie turned out.
My sense is that your time as Spider-Man ended sooner than you would have expected. Did it feel like you were finally closing a circle, by coming back to that part?
I don’t know if I had an expectation of doing more. I was very open to it being whatever it was meant to be. But there was an undone feeling. Like, What was that experience about? And how do I close that circle in my living room on my own? And I was doing that – and then it was like that classic thing, when you’re getting over a relationship, and you’re first starting to really feel free and untethered from that thing – the person knows to call the hour after the first good night’s sleep you’ve had.
But doing [No Way Home] was really just kind of beautiful. I got to treat it like a short film about Spider-Man with buddies. The pressure was off of me. It was all on Tom’s shoulders. Like, it’s his trilogy. And me and Tobey were there to provide support and have as good a time as possible, actually, and be as inventive, imaginative, and kind of dumb as possible. Y’know, between the three of us, I was like, Oh shit, this is going to be interesting. You have three people who feel real ownership over this character. But it was really, like, brotherhood first, I think. And I think that comes through in what we shot.
It’s my favourite part of the movie, to be honest. When it becomes the three of you basically doing a podcast about what it’s like to be Spider-Man...
[Laughs]
…which was a very different job, for each of you. Tom Holland still has to carry these films, but they’re part of the larger Marvel machinery, which means on some level they’re too big to fail. You walked in there, after Tobey Maguire, and had to carry a Spider-Man movie by yourself. With no guarantee that you’d get to do it again.
Yup. It was an interesting experience, for sure. And I was 25, 26...
I always forget that. Peter’s supposed to be so youthful, but you were in your late 20s.
But still young, though. I feel that about myself as a 26-year-old. I’m like, Fuck, that was a lot to take on. It’s a shit-tonne to take on. And I wanted to take it on. I was ready. I was so up for it. It didn’t feel heavy. But I think there were elements that felt very... I sensed danger for myself, in terms of fame and exposure. Even as I took [The Amazing Spider-Man] on, I was like, I wanna make sure I get to do Angels in America and Death of a Salesman in a few years’ time. I wanna be a theatre actor first, because that feels evergreen. If I can do theatre for the rest of my life to an audience of 50 people a night, I know that my life is going to be satisfying. That’s not me being glib – I really know that. If everything else fell away, we weren’t able to eat here [he gestures to the breeze-swept dining room, the ocean view beyond] I’d rent an apartment in London, and I can do theatre.
Danger aside, though, a franchise like Spider-Man also opens up opportunities, doesn’t it? Presumably even Martin Scorsese would not have gotten to make Silence, a movie about 17th-century Jesuit priests, without casting Spider-Man and Kylo Ren.
I think that. I think so. And even with that, it was hard for him to get it made. [Pause] It’s that eternal struggle between being devoted to the invisible world, the world of spirit, the world of imagination, creativity, what we know we’re meant to do. But if we were purely devoted to that, it would be much harder for us to put a roof over our heads. So how do we balance that? We’re living through a capitalistic period in the history of humanity. And it’s deeply disgusting and horrific and ugly and all those things, as well as beautiful. It’s a fascinating time to be alive. And how do artists – how does anyone, because everyone is an artist – really retain that connection to soul, to spirit, to the unseen, to the thing that really pulls us? Our own personal genius. Our own personal calling. Giftedness. The Greeks, they call it the daimon. The divine twin. That spirit we were separated from as we passed through the birth canal.
Is that what happens?
That’s what happens, yeah. [Laughs] The Greeks figured it out. Basically, like, before we’re born, we’re in consort and connection with our divine twin, with our daimon, with our genius spirit. And then I forget what happens. I think part of the problem is we pass a tree of forgetfulness as well, as we’re about to be born. And we get separated and split from the divine. The idea is that after we’re born, for the rest of our lives, we get the opportunity to try to be reunited – to seek that genius spirit, to seek that twin that’s also seeking us.
Have you had moments where you feel like you’re hand-in-glove with that divine energy?
For sure. Yeah. I’ve been very lucky. I can think of multiple experiences – personally, creatively. It can show up in a friendship. Like, You’re good for my life and I’m good for yours. And also in a breakup, you know? It’s like, Oh, you’re back.
I’ve been surfing a lot, and whenever I surf, that’s a way of bringing it closer to me, for sure. And with work, definitely. Recently – this last period of time that we’ve been talking about – I’ve been given the gift of having that energy, that spirit, close to me.
This phase of your career, this chapter of work that you’re now on the other side of – where do you feel like it started?
It was Angels in America. The sense of achievement with that. The sense of surviving, and not missing a show, for however many months in London, and then however many months in New York – I didn’t drop a show. To live in that play for that long is like being in a washing machine for a year and a half. [Laughs] An existential washing machine. With angels and demons and lovers and ghosts, and longing for life, and illness, and the fragility of the mind and the fragility of the body – ultimately creating, like, a deep awareness of how remarkable it is that we’re all here.
So that play, I think, really starts to just pull me apart. And then my mum gets sick. [Laughs] And it’s like, Oh, right. I was preparing for something. The person that brought me into existence not being in existence anymore. I felt like it was all connected. She dies young. She dies at 69. Tick, Tick… Boom! became this kind of place where I got to continue singing her unfinished song, to keep her song alive, somehow.
When you said in April that you were looking forward to a few months off, it made headlines. People reacted as if you’d announced your retirement. That’s the nature of the culture now – there’s pressure for creative people to keep pushing out product all the time. If you’re not on the grind…
Maybe I should just stay on the grind. Maybe I should find something to attach myself to. I’m freaked out now. Just this conversation has done it. [Laughs] I will absolutely get back on it. I will be a slave to capitalism. [Garfield leans in closer to the recorder on the table] I’m down. I love capitalism. I love capitalism. I will be a cog in the machinery.
I mean, obviously I’m in a privileged position. I’m of a generation slightly older than the iPhone generation. That kind of ‘hustle culture’ – I lived pre-that, I suppose. But it’s a tricky one, because I’m for hard work. I was raised by a swimming-coach father. I like feeling devoted. I like grinding at something that I care about, for sure.
Right. You were an athlete before you were an actor. I have to assume that never leaves you.
It’s in me. For sure. There was a time when winning and losing was my identity. And it still is, kind of. I played pickleball with some friends the other day. It was my first time playing, and I was playing these two incredibly gifted young tennis athletes, just in their driveway – and inside I was just burning. [Laughs]
Why? Because you were getting...
Whupped! [Laughs] It never goes away. That shame of losing, and the relief of winning.
I think it says something that even someone in your position grapples with this stuff: the pressure to constantly be producing, the fear of being left behind. There’s not a level of success that frees you from those questions.
No. It makes me think about – and it’s funny, I’m sorry, but my reference point for everything now, I just go back to my mum not being here. I just go to that and what that means. It means I’m not gonna be here long, and we’re not gonna be here long. That doesn’t provide any answers, but it does feel like it sharpens an arrow of direction, in some mysterious way.
But then, I don’t know – my dad, right now, I think, is just meant to tend his back garden. He’s lost his wife, and I think all he’s meant to do right now, for the most part – it’s going to make me cry – is play with his grandkids, and create this back garden. He’s turned it into, like, a subtropical jungle. He’s got a water feature and a moat. He’s gone crazy, as grief will make you do, but he’s gone toward beauty and nature and self-soothing. And I’m really kind of impressed with him for that. The fact that he’s created something so beaut–
[A pause. Garfield tears up]
Fuck. Fucking hell, man. It’s awful. It hurts – the beauty of it hurts, so much. Knowing he’s created something so beautiful out of the worst loss you could ever, like – [voice breaking] They were together, in love. They were an imperfect couple that stayed together. And for him to be left, now, to deal with what that means – I’m not going to speak for his experience, because that’s not appropriate. But I feel like I can say: I feel like making a garden is plenty. You know what I mean? I don’t think we’re all meant to save the world all the time.
All this makes me think about Tick, Tick… Boom!, which among other things is a story about a guy who’s pushing 30 and worries about what he still hasn’t accomplished. You’re, what, 38?
Thirty-nine. I’m turning 40 in a year. Next summer. Next August.
It’s closer than I thought!
Me too! [Laughs]
How does that feel? Does that date feel like it’s something looming over you?
It’s interesting. It feels far off. I need to start thinking about a good party. If I organise something fun, it’ll be great. And the good news is, all my high school friends, we’re all celebrating [turning 40] together. But it’s interesting – I always thought I would be the first to have kids and settle down, and they’re all shacked up and a couple of kids deep, for the most part. And I’m like… [Trails off, laughs]
You’re here with me.
I’m here with you, eating a burger, just contemplating existence. Trying to fill my days with as much nonsense as I possibly can. So that’s interesting. Releasing myself from the societal obligation of procreating by the time I’m 40 has been an interesting thing to do with myself. [Laughs] I’m not going to bore your readers with the machinations of...
Of why it didn’t happen?
Oh, God. Where do I start with why it didn’t happen? [Laughs] No, it’s more about accepting a different path than what was kind of expected of me from birth. Like, By this time you will have done this, and you will have at least one child – that kind of thing. I think I have some guilt around that. And obviously it’s easier for me as a man...
There’s still time.
As far as I know. [Knocks on wood]
You could be Anthony Quinn. Get at it in your 70s.
I’d rather not.
You say that now.
Yes. No, we’ll see. [Laughs] Life seems to be a perpetual practice of letting shit go. Letting go of an idea of how a thing should look, or be, or feel. And that one’s a big one [to let go of], because of course I would’ve loved my mum to have met my kids, if I’m going to have kids. And she will. In spirit. She’ll be there for it. I know she’s there, for all the big ones.
But, yeah. Life, life, life. Life is in charge. We’ll see. We’ll see what happens. I’m curious.
Back when Garfield was going to his first movie auditions, he’d see the same faces at every casting call. Actors like Eddie Redmayne (“my friend, my bro”) and Robert Pattinson. Charlie Cox. Jamie Dornan. It’s an estimable list of elder-millennial British actors who’ve gone on to different kinds of commercial and creative success. But Garfield’s arc might be the most surprising, particularly post-Amazing Spider-Man. His hits have been unlikely ones – like Hacksaw Ridge, a war movie about a conscientious objector – and his misses are still interesting (the hipster Pynchon-style mystery Under the Silver Lake).
There’s also a broader cultural resonance to Garfield’s work. The Social Network now plays like an accidental prequel to the 2016 US presidential election. The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Under the Banner of Heaven seem to speak even more directly to the fracturing psyche of the United States. They’re both about religious fundamentalism and what can fester under its aegis – greed and corruption in ...Tammy Faye, misogynist violence in ...Banner. Despite being set in the 1980s, both stories felt all-too-topical in an America increasingly gripped by a toxic Christian nationalism.
In ...Banner of Heaven, Garfield – who was born in Los Angeles but raised in Surrey from age three, and remains a dual citizen of the US and UK – plays a decent man confronting the reality that the institutions he’s built his life around may be irredeemably corrupt. Although the show is about murder among Mormons in 1984, it captures the feeling of waking up in a country you no longer recognise. That national identity crisis plays out on his face in nearly every shot.
Faith has been a through-line in a lot of your work. Silence is about the way faith persists under extreme duress. The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Under the Banner of Heaven are about the dark side of faith. You’ve said you were brought up Jewish, but not particularly religious, and yet you’re drawn to these themes.
Yeah. It’s instinctive. I think what was compelling to me about Silence was that it was like an ayahuasca journey this guy was going on, actually. He had to die. His ego had to die, his belief system. He had to get broken into a million pieces to have his consciousness expanded, to know that a life of spirituality wasn’t just an A-to-B, linear, simple, didactic route.
He has to die in order to know what he actually believes.
Totally. And to know that a life of faith is a life of doubt, actually, rather than a life of certainty. And it’s something similar to what Pyre goes through in Under the Banner of Heaven. Pyre was really interesting to me, because it was a very human dilemma. There was something really interesting about a man, a person, who was getting broken open. Who was kind of sensitive and smart enough to doubt everything, and to let himself question everything. And good-hearted enough to leave no stone unturned and to prioritise the lives of this woman and her baby over his own.
So, thinking about the draw to faith and spirituality [in the work], I think it’s more about the breaking of faith. It’s about growth, really. The container getting larger somehow. It’s the same experience I went through with Mum. I was in a reality where she was always going to be alive, and now I’m in a true reality, where it’s like, Oh, no. She was never always going to be alive. And none of us are always going to be. I think I’m drawn to that. Just – widening. Widening consciousness. Widening the heart, maybe, as well.
But then you think about Hacksaw Ridge. That was a guy who was touched by something. Divine protection, courage, genius, whatever you want to call it – he was surrounded by the angels.
He had the ring of fire.
Yeah. He had the angels with him. But in order to get there, he had to go through the unbearable tension of being stretched and broken open by a system that didn’t want his nuance, that didn’t want his individualism, I suppose. So there’s always some test, I suppose, that I’m curious about. Like people on hunger strikes – getting down to their essential nature, somehow, getting down to the bare bones of who they are. There’s something about stripping everything away that I’m compelled by, I think. A spiritual journey where you’re trying to get to the essential spirit of something, which is not material, which is not the body, which is that kind of ineffable, cosmic, unfathomable thing.
It seems like, in your work, you’ve been able to explore questions and ideas that mean something to you. Not everybody gets that.
I’m grateful for it. I’m very fortunate. I’ve been mentored by the human beings in my life. I’m so lucky that I’ve had the opportunities I’ve had. And the friendships I’ve had, and the mentors and the teachers. But I’m also pretty intent. Like, I’m not a nice person to be around if I’m not able to follow the thing that I feel I’m supposed to follow [laughs].
If you feel like you’re doing some bullshit?
If I feel like I’m doing some bullshit, if I feel like I’m in the wrong room with the wrong people – no one wants that version of me. I don’t want to subject anyone to that version of me. Let alone myself.
Directors see you as someone who’s believable in wrestling with these big questions. Scorsese is one. But the one I love is David Fincher, who said he could never have cast you as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, because you were way too human...
[Blows air out – Pbbbt. The sound, perhaps, of him preemptively deflating his own balloon]
…and had too much access to your inner life.
That’s funny. Yeah. It’s so funny, because Jesse [Eisenberg]’s inner life is so live- wire. And I think it was more like, [Fincher] thought I could do both, but I was just more naturally suited [for the part of Zuckerberg’s estranged cofounder, Eduardo Saverin].
And I love his performance, but looking back, I think Jesse ended up bringing an unrealistic level of humanity to Zuckerberg, too.
That’s what Jesse struggled with so much, I think. He was like, It’s so hard to be opaque. Because Jesse is – I don’t know if you’ve ever met him – but he’s just, like, a mile a minute. Intellect. Heart. It’s crazy.
But, no. I mean, those are the moments – whether it’s Fincher or Scorsese, or Tony Kushner, or Mike Nichols, whoever. It feels like you’re being blessed by a high priest of the art. I think we all need that, in whatever we’re doing. We need blessings from elders, from the ones that have found their place.
You mentioned ayahuasca. You’ve mentioned it in interviews before. Have you experimented with it, or other shortcuts to expanded consciousness?
I feel like talking about it in interviews never comes off. In, like, an actor interview. Talking about plant medicine. [Pause] I’ve definitely [laughs] had a few very profound experiences. It fascinates me, really. Consciousness is like deep space travel – we’re never going to know all of it. So I’m all for anything that helps us to reach those doors.
I met someone recently who – I won’t mention their name – but they developed this thing after smoking DMT, called advanced savant syndrome. They did DMT and they just became an expert in a field that they’d never studied.
What – like they tripped and suddenly knew a language?
A scientific language. Astrophysics. So this stuff is not for the faint of heart. Like, what an amazing gift he’s been given – but also, y’know, that’s a lot to contend with.
Yeah. That’s my concern. I’m nervous about ego death. Maybe I need my ego, checking IDs at the door.
Dude. I have to tell you. In one of my plant medicine experiences, there was a moment where I was so happy to remember what a toilet seat was. I’m not gonna go into it deeper than that, but there was a purging that I did, and up until that moment, nothing was identifiable.
Nouns didn’t exist...
I didn’t exist. Like, it was the thing that I had been longing for, with my work, which is to reconnect with everything. And it’s like, OK. I get it. Let me back. I wanna go back. But I have to say, the moment after I vomited, and found my cheek against the toilet seat, this cold porcelain [laughs] – when I realised I remembered what that was against my face, I think I started sobbing. Thank God for the ego. Thank God for the delineation of things. Thank God for the world of opposites – this being my face, and that being a toilet seat. There’s plenty of time to get to the everything.
But I think sometimes we need to dip our toe [into that], to remember. Because otherwise we get too [taps the table] here. We get too of-the-world. And to become too of-this-world means we lose our souls. We’re seeing it all the time. We��re seeing a kind of meaningless, this pervasive kind of epidemic, I think, of lack of meaning in people’s lives. And I think it’s a lot to do with an overemphasis on [taps the table again] the material world. Materialism. And rationality. Rather than the eternal things. The eternal things in nature, in the imagination, the things that unite us.
You’ve talked a lot about losing your mum today. It strikes me that, in all the emotional reactions you’re describing, none of it seems to be about regret.
No. Thank God, yeah. There was no stone left unturned. There was nothing left unsaid. The wild thing is, even though we loved her to the max – there’s still love to give. That’s interesting. And that love can feel like grief, or can be renamed grief, in a way, because it would be so nice to be able to continue to love her in person. Her not being here to receive it, with her body, creates some grief. But the love is still love. It’s that unconditional well of infinity that I suddenly got access to, through the loss. It was like, Oh, shit – like striking oil. It’s never-ending. The grief is never-ending. The love is never-ending. Like, Oh. That’s the nature of love.
What do you do with that information?
You let it drown you sometimes. You ride it sometimes. You give thanks, that’s the point. And it’s so trite and so cliché, but that’s it. Whatever that unnameable thing is, that we try to call “love,” that’s what we’re meant to experience here, somehow.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Photographs by Luke Gilford
Styled by Michael Darlington
Grooming by Sonia Lee for Exclusive Artists using Le Domaine Skincare and Oribe
Hair by Jeff Verbeck
Tailoring by Yelena Travkina
Production by Petty Cash
Subscribe to see the full GQ DecJan/MOTY issue