Andrew Garfield is a thoughtful, gentle man, and he apparently has some thoughtful, gentle opinions about why people didn’t much like the recent Spider-Man movie he starred in. Talking to Marlow Stern of The Daily Beast, Garfield blames—in a thoughtful, gentle way—the studio executives at Columbia Pictures for taking an introspective drama about the travails of a Dickensian orphan boy, set adrift in the world with nothing but awesome superpowers to protect him, and turning it into a giant blockbuster action movie with Rhinos and Goblins and electric men, oh my:
Once you start removing things and saying, “No, that doesn’t work,” then the thread is broken, and it’s hard to go with the flow of the story. Certain people at the studio had problems with certain parts of it, and ultimately the studio is the final say in those movies because they’re the tentpoles, so you have to answer to those people
But I’ll tell you this: Talking about the experience as opposed to how it was perceived, I got to work in deep scenes that you don’t usually see in comic book movies, and I got to explore this orphan boy—a lot of which was taken out, and which we’d explored more.
Of course, Andrew Garfield is not just a sensitive Spider-Man, but a sensitive Man-Man, as well. The interview covers a wide range of topics—many of them related to Garfield’s upcoming real-estate drama, 99 Homes—and the actor has something thoughtful to say about all of them:
- On performing in Death Of A Salesman with Philip Seymour Hoffman: “I feel so privileged that I got to be in the shit with him every night for four months. We were able to really have our souls brush up against each other in a very intimate—and scary—way.”
- On the celebrity nudes scandal: ”It’s disgusting. It’s this violent, abusive violation of womanhood—of divine womanhood.”
- On capitalism: “You know what the religion of a city is by the tallest building. So, what’s the religion of New York City? It’s a dollar bill. Trade. That’s God. Money is God. And that’s a shame.”
It is, Andrew Garfield, it is. (Even if those tall buildings do give you cool stuff to broodingly swing through on your webs, ruminating at all times on the death of your beloved Spider-Mom and Spider-Dad.)