In Reunited, Awards Insider hosts a conversation between two Oscar contenders who have collaborated on a previous project. Here, we speak with Lost Daughter actor Dakota Johnson and Tick, Tick…Boom! star Andrew Garfield, who previously appeared together in the 2010 drama The Social Network.
The Social Network, David Fincher’s 2010 drama about Mark Zuckerberg and the creation of Facebook, has remained firmly part of the cultural conversation—after all, the influence of the social media network on our lives and politics has only increased. But this year also brings an opportunity to celebrate two of its stars who are making their way through the awards circuit: Andrew Garfield, who played Eduardo Saverin, and Dakota Johnson, who, in her first film role, played Amelia Ritter.
The 32-year-old Johnson, who went on to lead the Fifty Shades franchise, plays a conflicted young mother in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter. And Garfield, 38, who went on to don the Spider-Man suit for two films before diving into more auteur-driven fare like Hacksaw Ridge and Silence, delivers a career-best performance as Rent creator Jonathan Larson in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tick, Tick…Boom!
Their current projects could not be more different, but their paths to get to them, from the early days of The Social Network to leading big franchises (and the fandom that comes with that), have been eerily similar. Vanity Fair reunited the two in Los Angeles for a conversation about filming with Fincher, dealing with the spotlight of fame, and the “rotten fish” of social media.
Vanity Fair: What do you remember about the first time you met?
Andrew Garfield: Do you remember when we actually first met? We didn’t have any scenes together, obviously, in that film, The Social Network.
Dakota Johnson: No, and you and Jesse [Eisenberg] were so busy on that movie, and I was obviously in it for four seconds, but I spent a few days on set just watching. I remember sitting down with you guys when you were having lunch one day, and you asked me loads of questions. You were really nice—and Jesse didn’t acknowledge me. He was probably in character.
Garfield: Oh boy, I don’t know. I feel like I need to defend him in some way. There was maybe some of the Zuckerberg coming through in that moment. He was probably overwhelmed by—
Johnson: By beauty.
Garfield: —by your beauty, yes. We did the movie, but then I remember seeing you at a party. I think it was at the Oscars or something, when David Fincher didn’t win and he should have, and I remember seeing you at the after-party, and you were just so lovely and energetic and excited to connect, and I felt the same way.
Johnson: That was when—I think people still do this—but Mark Townsend, who does my hair, used to put pieces of hair in my hair to make it look full. At those parties, I’d probably get a little drunk and then just take them out and put them in men’s jacket pockets because they’re so annoying and I’d just find a place to put them.
Garfield: Why men’s jacket pockets?
Johnson: Because they’re so available.
Dakota, The Social Network, in which you have a scene as a Stanford student who spends the night with Sean Parker, was your first movie role ever. What was your frame of mind that day?
Johnson: We shot that scene in one day, and that day Terrence Malick came to set to watch how David was working with digital, and I was like, What?
Garfield: How was that, being your first film outside of the Malick? You add the Malick as the icing on top.
Johnson: It was so cool. I loved it.
Garfield: Did you come in nervous, or did you come in just open?
Johnson: No, I was so nervous. Before you shoot anything, I don’t sleep, and you kind of have that hollow, nervous, shaky feeling, but it was amazing. It was the best.
Garfield: And what was David like with you?
Johnson: He was so kind and lovely. How was he with you?
Garfield: Same. I think he has this weird reputation of making people not go to the bathroom and so they have to pee in jars on set. I don’t know if you’ve heard those things about him? So I came in thinking, This is going to be like working under some kind of taskmaster, but I just loved it. And the excessive takes don’t feel excessive. I didn’t feel it was excessive.
Johnson: No, me neither. Was he super specific about continuity?
Garfield: Yes. Physical continuity. But he was very free with blocking. There was one time he was didactic with me about blocking, and it was in the moment during the litigation, towards the end of the litigation between me and Jesse, because that stuff can be quite boring because it’s just people just sitting across from each other. There was a moment where he was very, very clear he wanted me to be looking out of the window with my back turned to the desk and then to turn around at a specific point and say a thing directly to Jesse and then not blink and not break eye contact with him for the rest of the scene. So that was the only very didactic, specific piece of blocking that he gave me, and it’s cool. It’s great. I just trusted him, which is such a hard thing to find with a filmmaker.
Johnson: I find that really, creatively, almost liberating, when you’d think it would be the opposite when you have such a limited place to move, but it does so much, I think, emotionally.
Garfield: So this is a weird story, and I probably shouldn’t say this. I was accidentally brought into Justin’s—Justin Timberlake of stage, screen, and pop star fame—trailer by one of the second A.D.s one day. And I was like, “This isn’t my trailer,” and I saw some of his homework. I saw, like, a board with cue cards and some of his internal choices and substitutions and-
Johnson: And you were like, “Oh no, I should leave,” but you didn’t. You read all of it.
Garfield: I was like, “Oh, I must leave and as I leave, I must let my eyes linger for as long as possible as I leave,” because I mean, of course, because it’s just there and thank God it wasn’t anything bad. It was only cool.
Johnson: That is fucked up. I can’t believe you did that. I hope he watches this interview. Actually, I hope he never sees this interview.
Andrew, around the time The Social Network was being released was also the time you were announced as the new Spider-Man. What do you remember about that massive shift in your career?
Garfield: It was when we started promoting and talking about Social Network that they broke the news to me that everything was going to change and I was going to suddenly be in this other world that I felt was very foreign and wild and all the things that you know about with your foray into your version of that.
Johnson: Spider-Man? I know so much about that.
Garfield: No, but you do in your own way with the film [Fifty Shades of Grey] with Jamie [Dornan], because it’s the same thing in terms of feeling available to the world and especially with what you were going through with that film because it is so metaphorically naked. This is maybe a more personal question, but how do you have such good boundaries in your life and with an audience in order to carry on being naked on screen, whether it’s literal or otherwise? I know it’s something that I think about all the time to keep myself sacred, to keep my life sacred so that I can feel free to go and carry on giving myself to my work.
Johnson: Well, it takes a lot to be private now, like so much effort every day. You don’t do certain things or go certain places.
Garfield: It makes you focus on the things that matter and the relationships that matter and the friendships. It’s worth the effort, I find. I would much rather work really hard, but then there are some days where I just don’t care. In Canada, there’s this great place, the Repsol Center, which is a big sports center in Calgary and it has a steam room and a cold plunge, badminton courts, table tennis, big swimming pools. And I love those sports. So sometimes when I’m at the Repsol Center, if someone says, “Hey, are you the guy from the thing?” I’m like, “No, I look like him,” and then we can have an actual conversation, but then sometimes I’m very just like, “Yeah. I am and I’m going to disappoint you now.” You know what I mean?
Johnson: Why do you feel like you would disappoint them?
Garfield: I think about me and Tom Hanks. It’s the thing of I know that Tom Hanks is just a person, but to me he is-
Johnson: The ultimate hero. Have you ever met him?
Garfield: I have, and he didn’t disappoint.
Johnson: No, he doesn’t.
Garfield: But quite the contrary, I would and not in a bad, not in a self-flagellation way. It’s more that I give myself permission to be ordinary, to be a person.
Johnson: But don’t you think that would make people feel that you’re more grounded and more of a human?
Garfield: A lot of the time, it does do that. If someone’s open to me being a person, we have a lovely conversation, but then there are some people that don’t want that. They want—
Johnson: They want you to start climbing up the walls.
Garfield: They want the Mickey Mouse. Yeah, exactly or they want you to be tied up to a thing and that’s an unfair position for you to be put in.
Johnson: For sure.
Garfield: I just felt that physically. Even joking about it feels horribly inappropriate.
Johnson: Isn’t it horrible?
Garfield: And I’m sorry that that’s become a thing that you must have to deal with in intense ways where there’s an expectation or an image in people’s minds.
Johnson: For sure. I think it comes back to, at the end of the day, you’re an actor acting. You’re playing a part. So, for people to think that maybe that’s who you are or for people to think that you have to be a certain person in order to play a part, it’s all a big mess. Do you ever get the people that go like, “Hey, What do I know you from?” And you’re like, “I don’t know.” And they’re like, “Well, you’re an actor. What have you been in?” And you’re like, “What? Am I going to pull up my IMDb page? Like list movies I’ve done so that you can feel better?”
Garfield: I know. It’s so interesting. People are so interesting. There’s one benefit that we get to experience that, because that anthropological study of human beings and what feels okay to say to someone.
Johnson: It feels like that just comes out of insecurity. Of like, “I don’t want to expose that I think you’re great.” Which is such a good thing to say to someone is like, “I think you’re so great.”
Garfield: Who doesn’t love to hear that?
Johnson: I know, but a lot of people don’t like to say that to other people.
Garfield: Well, because if people are close to their own giftedness and are expressing their own calling or living into their destiny in a way that feels right, then I think that people are much easier to go to, “Hey, hi. I see you. I like it.” When people are away from their own giftedness and they can feel it and they see someone else who’s living in a way that’s more courageous maybe or daring or vulnerable –
Johnson: – Or even just truthful. I think there’s so many people that don’t even know what their purpose is.
Garfield: I think that’s maybe the main tragedy of modern life. I think that feels to me like the tragedy of the post-industrial revolution where everyone suddenly went from being unique and having that giftedness maybe honored more into how many units are you producing and are you a good producer and how many hours did you? Oh, good. And how much did you buy and are you adding to the economy? It's that very cold, industrial way of looking at the world. It reminds me of that great D. H. Lawrence poem Healing, which I don’t have memorized, but it starts with like, “I am not a mechanism. I’m not a series of mechanical parts.” It’s a really beautiful poem.
Johnson: But don’t you think we’ve gone past that a little bit now to people where people are just, they don’t even realize that they could have a sole purpose or a dream-
Garfield: Sole purpose is the perfect way to say it and you’re right because I think that it’s been so normalized to live a life of self-limitation.
Johnson: And it’s become so scary, I think, to go, “What is my truth?” Because so much I think of someone’s truth is scrutinized now.
Garfield: And held under a microscope. Well, going back to our film that we are in together from a long time ago now, that’s so nice that people are still talking about it because it was such a great movie, but do you think it is to do with specifically or maybe it’s just been enhanced by those technologies that have thin sliced everything?
Johnson: I do. I don’t think they’ve necessarily helped people, humanity. Do you think that social media is mostly good or mostly bad?
Garfield: I don’t know. I lean towards get rid of it and I think a lot of people saw The Social Dilemma, that great Netflix documentary, which was saying everything that we already know, but I think in a very accessible way. What I find interesting and it goes back to Facebook and Zuckerberg and all of the individuals who have created these technologies and platforms that the majority of humanity are now spending time interacting through, I think you can find the dysfunction that gets created from these technologies, I think it’s all the rotten head of the fish. So, I think Zuckerberg’s obviously a man that has struggled to connect with people in an emotionally intelligent, deep way and he’s created a whole thing where all of that trickiness that he experiences is now spread between everyone. So, there’s this terrible superficial connection that’s happening that is limiting how we can actually relate.
Johnson: Can you imagine if the pull quote, the headline from this interview is, “Andrew Garfield Calls Mark Zuckerberg a Rotten Fish?” [Laughs].
On that note, let’s turn to your current films. They are both directed by people who are also actors. How did that affect your experience?
Johnson: There’s something about Maggie who is like a real truth seeking actor and now a real truth seeking director who knows what it feels like to be an actor acting, especially a woman, especially on a beach in a bathing suit and doing dark things and thinking and feeling dark things. So, she created a really safe place for me and everyone to do really extreme things. That’s not something that can be artificial. It comes from being genuinely loved and genuinely seen by your director, which I think is so rare.
Garfield: And that comes from genuine experience as well and proper bone-deep empathy and care, which is the greatest gift and that’s wonderful. Gosh, I want to work with her. It was the same with Lin. Lin—
Johnson: I don’t think he’ll ever want to work with me.
Garfield: Why do you say that?
Johnson: Because I can’t do that stuff that you did. I get really nervous singing in front of people. Did you learn to play the piano?
Garfield: Yeah. I learned a couple of the songs. Listen, it was a gift this one because I had a year to learn how to sing and to learn piano and to get the choreography down and to study John, to really immerse myself in this amazing man who lived and breathed and walked among us and was taken very young from us at the age of 35 and it is one of those rare ones where you go, “Oh, I like getting up in the morning for this.”
Johnson: Did you spend any time with people who knew him?
Garfield: Oh yeah, lots of people. His sister, Julie Larson was a big resource and a producer on the film. From her to one of the people that lost their virginity to him. Everyone was lining up around the block to just share about John because I think when someone, when anyone dies, we want the beauty of keeping their memory alive by talking about them and by repeating stories over and over again. It’s like a ritual, right? It keeps their spirit here with us no matter if they die at 35 or 80. So, I think especially with someone who died so young—I remember feeling it with Heath [Ledger]. I don’t know if you knew Heath?
Johnson: I didn’t know him.
Garfield: He died in the middle of a film that we were making together. And also he was just obviously such an incredible artist and a gift to the world and I think the same goes for Jonathan. It was like the amount of people that want to keep his spirit alive enabled us to get all of the information and all of the subjective experiences that people had with him and I love that.
Since you’ve been discussing the idea of celebrity for a bit of this, can you tell me a time when you were truly starstruck?
Garfield: When I first came to Hollywood when I was 24 and this was all new to me and I went to a party. And I forget the actor’s name, but one of the Fratelli Brothers [from The Goonies], one of the bad guys was there. He was smoking a cigar. I had to lean against the wall — I genuinely slightly collapsed just seeing him and I thought, “This is the happiest day of my life and that’s it.”
Johnson: That’s a good one.
Garfield: Do you have a decent one?
Johnson: I met Mel C the other night. And I played it so cool. And she was so awesome and she was wearing, of course, this tracksuit. And then afterwards I lost my shit and she left the room and I was so weird.
Garfield. I love that.
Johnson: But now we’re texting.
Garfield: Oh my God. I’m not texting with the Fratelli guy.
Johnson: Do you want to be?
Garfield: Yeah.
Johnson: That could happen!
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