Hollywood has a nasty habit of chewing up innocent, young souls and then spitting them out, leaving formerly wide-eyed and joy-filled actors with nothing but millions of dollars, priceless name recognition, and the bitter tears of disappointment. Sadly, that’s pretty much exactly what happened to likable moppet Andrew Garfield, who told Amy Adams as part of Variety’s “Actors On Actors” series that working on the two Amazing Spider-Man movies left him “heartbroken a little bit to a certain degree.”
When Garfield first appeared onscreen as the famous wall-crawler, he was but a 28-year-old boy who foolishly still believed that big-budget superhero movies were more about telling a good story or presenting well-rounded characters than they were about making money. “I signed up to serve the story, and to serve this incredible character that I’ve been dressing as since I was three,” he told Amy Adams, adding that “it gets compromised and it breaks your heart.”
As for Amy Adams (who also has some experience with superhero movies), she says she has a hard time feeling ownership over the role of Lois Lane in the DC movie universe. “I love playing her, I love everyone I work with,” she explains, “but sometimes it’s tricky because I feel she’s in service of the story instead of the story serving the character.” Interestingly, that argument could still be used for almost any other incarnation of Lois Lane, whether it’s in a movie, TV show, or a comic book, so that might not actually be the movie industry’s fault. Maybe superhero stuff just needs better writers in general.
You can see the full video of Garfield and Adams’ chat at this link.