Andrew Garfield wasn't made for Hollywood; an interview with Vulture last year saw him raging at the very convention of interviews themselves, tired of the constant insistence on self-analysis and invasion of privacy. He was, however, born in Los Angeles, with a father who dreamt of Hollywood - but the Garfield family moved back to his mother's English homeland when Andrew was just four years old. Now he is, by his own admission, firmly transatlantic, "equally at home in both places". He has fulfilled his father's latent dreams of movie stardom, but Garfield grew up on the British stage, an arena where character comes first and celebrity is a rare imposition. Many commentators have made note of how many British actors have taken on major roles in Hollywood franchises, but none seem so conflicted and contradictory about their place there as Garfield.

 

He is the epitome of a 21st century movie star: his childhood adoration of Spider-Man carried through to his performance, a protective defence of character in the face of the huge Hollywood machine that churned out those disappointing films. He loves the product but hates the process; being on the inside has soured him. Interviews rolling in during the promotion of last year's 99 Homes gave us plenty of soundbites on his disillusion with the industry and the ensuing celebrity. This was an attitude which chimed perfectly with the pessimism and gloom of the film itself, in which Garfield's character reluctantly enters a similarly brutal system and despises his own part within it.

Despite now being 32, Garfield might have been too young to enter such a huge franchise, though the pressure on the two Amazing Spider-Man films came more from the need to rescue the character from his previous critical mauling. But where an older actor like Christian Bale had more wisdom and control in shaping the reinvention of a familiar character, Garfield's position was wounded by the very vulnerability that made him such perfect casting in the first place. It may also, perversely, have set him up for a more rewarding career than we could ever have dreamt of. Would his performance in 99 Homes have been so resonant if the actor didn't have that deep understanding of betraying his own values?

Boy ABrits of a certain age may recall first seeing that messy hair and gawky teenage face in Sugar Rush, a cult British lesbian teenage drama where Garfield’s character pined hopelessly for the main character, even though her own eyes were firmly lusting after her best friend. He used the same hangdog impression to devastating, BAFTA-winning effect in Boy A, a searing film directed by Brooklyn helmer John Crowley. Garfield played a young man released from secure unit, where he’d been since childhood for his part in the murder of a classmate. Writing at the time on a Blogspot long consigned to the ashes of the internet, I gushed about "Garfield's superb, poignant, disconcertingly familiar performance”, and I can’t disagree with the truth of that awkward turn of phrase: watching it back now, Garfield is astonishingly frank and open, laying bare a complex well of feelings of guilt, confusion, fear and hope for the audience to examine.

Roles in dark TV drama Red Riding and low-key film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's tenderly cynical Never Let Me Go also exploited Garfield's emotional perspicacity to keen effect, placing him against drained, bare backgrounds that did little to diffuse the idea of Britain as a grim, cold environment but gave his implosion of naivety an appropriately melancholic fatigue. Garfield's next project, and the film that would prove his Hollywood big break, was David Fincher's The Social Network. The milieu was still downbeat and dark, but Fincher's style lent it a glossiness appropriate to the currency of the subject, and used Garfield's keen intellect for the Eduardo Saverin to Jesse Eisenberg's impossibly difficult Mark Zuckerberg.

The Social Network

It wasn't Garfield's first time playing American - he'd made his Hollywood debut in the misbegotten Lions for Lambs, making a mark as a disillusioned student - but this was where he cemented the essential fibres of his on-screen persona, combatting Eisenberg's eccentricities with his own unique character. Garfield brought to both Savarin and Peter Parker a British kind of Americanness: a blind trust in human goodness undercut by a savvy self-doubt, questioning how that morality manifests within his own character. In what is perhaps The Social Network’s most famous scene, Saverin seems embarrassed by his own defiance, as Garfield moves forward with an overdetermined stride, rage and shame overcoming him. He hisses that he’s going to sue for the whole company, but the inevitable sense of his loss (of the company, rather than any money) hangs in the shadow of Zuckerberg’s continued infamy.

Hacksaw RidgeTaking on the role of Peter Parker rather ironically seemed to corrupt Andrew Garfield, whose curtness in interviews seemed to turn to bitterness, though his cutting honesty has never abated. Dropped from the Spider-Man part in favour of fellow Brit Tom Holland, Garfield fled back to independent, auteur-led filmmaking, and thankfully, big names were ready to welcome him after a prolonged absence from non-superhero cinema. 2016 sees him in films from Martin Scorsese and, more surprisingly, Mel Gibson. The latter, Hacksaw Ridge, sees Garfield tackling a different kind of iconic American fighter, the soldier - though a conscientious objector. Most tantalisingly, he’s signed up to bring Angels in America back to the London stage. Forever, perhaps, the outsider on the inside, Andrew Garfield’s small filmography looks set to blossom from the ashes of a failed superhero stint. Hopefully Hollywood has learnt as many lessons as the actor it wronged.

What would your ideal project for Mr. Garfield be?

See website for complete article licensing information.