The actor has big ideas about life and death—even a theory about the nature of time. Over an afternoon at one of his favorite New York City haunts, the actor let us into his world.
The Confessions of Andrew Garfield
Andrew Garfield had a decision to make. He was twenty-seven and had gained international recognition for his supporting role in The Social Network. He was working on The Amazing Spider-Manand had just been offered another blockbuster film. Its director said he’d be crazy not to take it. But Garfield wasn’t so sure. He was considering another role, one that could change everything for him—if not in that particularly L.A. way that only Marvel can. Director Mike Nichols wanted him to play Biff Loman, Willy Loman’s son, in Death of a Salesmanon Broadway. But Nichols didn’t pressure him. If Garfield decided this is what he wanted to do, then this is what he wanted to do. Instead, they just talked. Garfield asked why Nichols had ended up in New York and not L.A. “He was like, ‘Why would I ever want to live in a place where I can tell how my stock is doing according to how the valet-parking attendant is looking at me on a day-to-day basis?’ ” Garfield recalls, doing a pretty good soothing, lilting Mike Nichols. “I was like, ‘Wow. I want to go where you’re going.’ ”
He did the play.
It’s tempting to see this as the most pivotal decision of Garfield’s career, especially since we know, in hindsight, how beautifully it all worked out. It’s tempting to see all of life this way, really—as a series of forking happenstances, one after another, none of which could have been without the one preceding it. That’s how life works in movies, after all. Beginning, middle, end. But life as we actually live it is more like a collection of small, disparate events that become meaningful only with the passage of time. That’s how Andrew Garfield sees it, anyway.
That play was twelve years ago, and Garfield, who just turned forty-one, is telling me this story at a restaurant on Central Park West, where we meet before taking a walk through the park to Bethesda Fountain. He’s delighted to be back in New York, even if it’s only for one day. He can’t stay longer, because he’s shooting two films concurrently, something he’s never done before—and something that he never even thought he’d try until he bumped into the actor and playwright Mark Rylance at a train station last year. Rylance is an actor’s actor, and he told Garfield how much he’d enjoyed shooting three films concurrently. It was wonderful, “like being in rep again,” Garfield recalls Rylance telling him. The comment inspired Garfield to take on After the Hunt, a “deep psychological dive” directed by Luca Guadagnino, and The Magic Faraway Tree, a family film based on a children’s book series, at the same time, which is why he’s got to get back to London. But, like Nichols, he loves it here. He loves the relative quiet of the city in the summer, the lushness of Central Park; perhaps, above all, he loves the theater here. New York is where he starred in Angels in Americain 2018. For more than a year—without missing a single show—he played Prior Walter, a gay man visited by spirits as his body is ravaged by AIDS, and he won a Tony for it. In that role, he would deliver a speech set at Bethesda Fountain that begins with the following lines: This is my favorite place in New York City. No, in the whole universe.
Garfield is in town to chat with me about his new film, We Live in Time(in theaters October 11), directed by John Crowley. Maybe it’s a testament to his pride in the movie that he’s happy to participate in this piece, despite his feeling—and here he paraphrases the British writer George Monbiot—that you can measure the sickness of a culture by how many column inches it devotes to celebrity profiles. That is to say, he’s aware that his own success story is fed by a societal obsession that deeply concerns him, but what can he do? He can’t control everything.
Talking to him is like this. One minute he’s going on about how much he enjoys his work, not to mention discussing it, and the next he’s lamenting that doing so contributes to “a false idolization of human beings.” He recommends I read a book by the feminist scholar bell hooks called All About Love, which focuses on how love can save us from the disconnection and meaninglessness of our capitalistic, patriarchal society. He also tells me that he believes we are living in the Kali Yuga, a Hindu term describing the depravity and moral decline of our current age.
SubscribeThis article appeared in the October/November 2024 issue of Esquire
But it’s a beautiful summer Saturday in New York City, and the Kali Yuga doesn’t seem to be upon us—at least not today. I’m early to our brunch, so I take a seat at a quiet corner table and order an Arnold Palmer. Sorry, the waitress says, the ice machine is broken. So . . . no Arnold Palmer for me. Diet Coke is fine. When Garfield arrives a few minutes later—sporting a full beard and a black baseball cap that is completely failing at the job of containing that marvelous head of hair—he orders avocado toast and a nonalcoholic cocktail. And wouldn’t you know it? His drink comes with three gorgeous cubes of ice in it.
I tell him about my Arnold Palmer problem. “I get the special ice,” Garfield says with a sigh. (“We had literally, like, six cubes of ice,” the waitress says in her own defense. “Do you want, like, a couple?”) I practically expect Garfield to offer me the cubes in his glass. He doesn’t like that in this world, for reasons that have nothing to do with his intrinsic value as a human being, he will never be forced to contend with a shortage of ice.
Garfield strokes his beard as we talk. He’s intense, charming, and thoughtful, known as a man who is comfortable feeling his feelings. He looks the part, too: His big, brown, pleading eyes seem ready to spill over at any moment. Indeed, his recent work has been a parade of tearjerkers, and after a week of watching them back-to-back, I promised myself I would not shed any tears during this interview. But we aren’t even thirty minutes in and I already feel my chin begin to tremble as Garfield describes his mother, Lynne Garfield, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2019, as “an incredible appreciator of all the minutiae, the small invisible things and kindnesses and miracles all around us.”
His mother’s death is another moment that would be easy to see as one that cleaved his life into halves. Instead, though, it put him in closer touch with what he calls the “golden thread” linking together events that seem random but become poignant and meaningful only in retrospect, after many years have elapsed. Take, for example, our post-brunch destination, Bethesda Fountain. Every time he delivered that final monologue in Angels in Americain front of the fountain, he was thinking of his mother—her appreciation for nature and the mystery of being alive.
In We Live in Time, Garfield plays Tobias, a dad who learns, over the course of the film, how grief “rearranges your whole psyche and opens you up to the multitudinous ways of accessing and being in life.” Written by Nick Payne, the British playwright best known for the play Constellations, the film centers on Tobias, a soon-to-be divorcé who is sleepwalking through life until he collides—quite literally—with Florence Pugh’s Almut. A hypercompetitive, award-winning chef fighting a cancer diagnosis, Almut wakes Tobias up to the agony and ecstasy of existence. The couple’s love story unfolds out of sequence, connecting events with that invisible “golden thread” of Tobias’s memory.
Garfield’s path to the role was dotted with some unexpected choices—and not just Death of a Salesman. He achieved a rare level of fame in Hollywood—Marvel-superhero fame—but in his post-Spidey era, he returned to theater and appeared in mostly small, independent films. “It’s beautiful to watch his process, in that he always knows instinctively what he needs to do,” says his friend Laura Dern, who played his mother in 99 Homes, an indie about the foreclosure crisis. “It’s not that he doesn’t weigh options, but he doesn’t make choices based on moves on the chessboard.”
In 2016, Garfield went on to play a seventeenth-century Portuguese Jesuit priest in Silence, and his performance was so moving to Pope Francis that His Holiness remarked to director Martin Scorsese that the actor deserved to be ordained. That same year, he starred as a conscientious objector in Mel Gibson’s World War II drama Hacksaw Ridge, for which he earned his first Oscar nomination. In 2021, he portrayed televangelist Jim Bakker opposite Jessica Chastain in The Eyes of Tammy Fayeas well as the late composer Jonathan Larson in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut, tick, tick . . . Boom!(He also surprised fans by reprising his role as Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home, the highest-grossing film of 2021.) He took on prestige television, too: For his role as a Mormon detective on FX’s true-crime series Under the Banner of Heaven(2022), he scored his first Emmy nod. This is nowhere near an exhaustive list.
It was this unbelievable work ethic that struck Lin-Manuel Miranda after he saw Garfield in Angels in Americain London. “If you just said the words, without any acting, [Angels] is an endurance test—basically you’re onstage for eight hours a day, living and dying and living. It takes everything out of you. I remember watching him and kind of clocking whether he had any resemblance to Jonathan Larson, because I just thought, This guy can do anything. I don’t know if he can sing or not, but I know that he’s doing an incredible feat in front of me right now. So I’m pretty sure he can do whatever he feels like.” Sure enough, Garfield learned to sing just for the tick, tick . . . Boom!role, something he’d never done before.
That film earned him his second Oscar nomination, but instead of energizing him, the 2022 awards season found him on the cusp of forty, burned out and struggling with a lack of inspiration. “When Mum died,” he says, “I felt like half of my ambition died as well.” He can’t explain it—he’s still trying to figure it out—but somehow the loss, the way it changed him, coupled with the positive reception to all the work he did during and after that loss, led him to feel something he had never felt before: satisfaction. This worried him. “Carl Jung said, ‘I see you suffered a success,’ because there’s no reckoning with the self when things are going well,” he says. So he decided to take some time off to “observe the harvest.”
Garfield had been surfing, spending time with friends, going to the theater, visiting his family in London, and traveling through Europe and Indonesia for a full year when he received the We Live in Timescript. It came with a note from John Crowley that said, “I think this might be one for us.”
Crowley directed Garfield in his first leading movie role—that of a child killer freshly out of prison, in 2007’s Boy A—and ever since they had wanted to collaborate again. Their schedules never aligned or the projects were just not the right fit, but the intervening years turned out to be a blessing. “He was twenty-four when we first worked together, so there’s a lot of life that’s happened to him since then,” says Crowley. “The reservoir that he’s drawing on, especially for this story, is bigger and richer and more potent.”
Upon reading the script for We Live in Time, Garfield thought to himself, This is for me. Shit.
Not only would the film offer him the chance to play a new type of character—a devoted partner and dad in the mold of Tom Hanks, one of his favorite actors—but he also saw it as a way to honor what his own father, Richard Garfield, had just gone through: losing the love of his life. Tobias is a true romantic, a man at ease with the grand gesture—I won’t spoil the movie, but know that he’s the type of guy who will show up at a party to which he was not invited and profess his love, a guy who will tell a woman that he wants children after a few dates. The role would demand more intimacy than anything he had ever done before, and not just emotionally. There’s an intense birth scene that is particularly gynecological: “We had to do the most intimate things I think human beings have to do—you know, [Pugh] had to be on all fours, then on a toilet, naked. And we have to have my face where I have my face, my hands where I have my hands, and the sex scenes have to be incredibly intimate,” he says.
All of this made Garfield nervous, particularly because he and Pugh barely knew each other. Crowley set up one Zoom meeting several months before they arrived on set. And they copresented the awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2023 Oscars, an experience Pugh calls “surreal, knowing that in a few months’ time you’re going to hopefully have connected in such a special way, but currently you’re strangers.” (When they walked out on stage arm in arm, looking fabulous, fans lost their minds on social media, clamoring for a Garfield–Pugh collaboration. We Live in Timewas announced the following week.)
By the time they wrapped up filming, Pugh says she had connected with Garfield in ways she has never experienced before with another actor. “We truly felt held by each other, and I felt like my abilities were respected and given back in his abilities,” she says. “When we finished the job, we both felt like, What an amazing partnership we have created and what an amazing thing to know that we will do it again.” Though there are no immediate plans for them to do it again, Pugh says she hopes “with every bone in my body” that it will happen.
Tilda Swinton once told Garfield that he’s “a work with, not a work for, type,” meaning he doesn’t just show up on set and act. He likes to get involved in all aspects of the moviemaking process. (At one point in our conversation, he suggests an idea for how to structure this story and then starts laughing when he realizes what he’s doing.) “I do have a little bit of control issues,” he says, stroking his beard again. “You know, just gentle control issues.”
But he wasn’t always this hands-on. The turning point, he says, was Hacksaw Ridge, after Mel Gibson showed him a cut of the film that he liked. Garfield told him that he loved it, too . . . but he had a few tiny notes. “[Gibson] was confident enough to be like, ‘Tell me, kid, tell me what you like.’ ” Miranda says he dubbed Garfield “Jonathan Larson’s representative” on the tick, tick . . . Boom!set. “It was always me asking him, ‘WWJD?’ What would Jonathan do?”
On We Live in Time, Garfield gave Crowley feedback on different assemblages of scenes and worked with Payne to fine-tune the script. For example, following a big argument, “I felt it was important for [Tobias] to say [to Almut], ‘The way you spoke to me is not acceptable’; otherwise he could feel a little bit doormat-y, which would not be sexy,” he says. (“It was a good note,” says Crowley.) Garfield also felt that giving Tobias more of a backbone was a way to pay tribute to his mother, who was “fierce when she needed to be with my dad.”
Born in Los Angeles to a Jewish American father and a British mother, Garfield moved to Surrey, England, with his family when he was three and his older brother, Ben, was six. In L.A., his father had a small moving company and his mother was at home with the kids, but she felt isolated and missed her family back in England. “She told my dad, ‘I’m going back. You can come or not. But I’m taking the kids,’ ” Garfield says. Once in England, his parents started a lampshade business that wound up failing, leading the family into a challenging financial period that was “miserable for everyone,” he recalls.
Growing up, he thought he’d be an athlete. A gifted child gymnast, he had so much potential that at one point he worked with a Russian coach who would sit on his back while Garfield did splits to increase his flexibility. But he hated it. “This is not a childhood,” he remembers thinking when he was twelve. So he quit, in what was “the first rebellion against my dad and his value system at the time: success and gold medals above any sense of joy, comfort, or pleasure.”
By the time he quit gymnastics, his dad had become a successful swimming coach, so Garfield tried swimming. “Everything he touches he’s very talented at,” says Richard. (Miranda says he discovered that Garfield was “the Michael Phelps of Hollywood” during a swimming scene in tick, tick . . . BOOM!when he was faster than the stunt double.) “It’s really annoying how Andrew is great at all these strange sports that Irish people like myself are not good at,” says his friend Jamie Dornan—who, it should be noted, is a former rugby player—citing Garfield’s talent at skateboarding, surfing, and basketball.
But despite his natural athleticism, Garfield couldn’t bring himself to embrace it fully. “It was like this Truman Showfeeling where you’re like, ‘I feel there is more. And I can’t identify what that more is, but I know it exists, and if it doesn’t exist, I am in big trouble,’ ” he says. So he quit swimming, too, in his second act of rebellion against his dad.
It was Lynne who suggested that Garfield explore his creative side. After exhausting nearly every artistic pursuit, including painting, sculpture, and music, he attended his first drama class and found that he couldn’t wait until the next one. Following a performance in a high school play, the new drama teacher approached Garfield and told him that if he was serious, he could make a career out of acting. Hearing those words, he finally felt like he could breathe.
There was, however, the matter of his father. When Garfield told him that he wished to pursue acting at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (aka “Central”)—the alma mater of British legends such as Dame Judi Dench and Sir Laurence Olivier—Richard was less than enthusiastic. Making a living was paramount in their house. At the time, Garfield’s older brother was a star student on his way to becoming a doctor. “I was terrified that it would all end in me supporting [Andrew] into his forties,” says Richard, who insisted that Garfield take a course in business studies just in case this whole acting thing didn’t work out.
It worked out.
The Social Network marked his big break, with his role as Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook cofounder who ended up getting pushed out of the company by his best friend, Mark Zuckerberg. “Garfield movingly lends the film a strong moral counterweight as the sensible superego to Mark’s raging id,” Varietywrote, while The New Yorkerlauded Garfield’s “emotional fluency.” By the time the film premiered in the fall of 2010, fans already knew the actor was going to be the next Spider-Man, succeeding Tobey Maguire. (When he found out he got the role, Garfield called his parents at 3:00 A.M. London time, shouting, “I don’t need those fucking business studies anymore, Dad!” Richard recalls, laughing.)
As his son’s career took off, Richard became more supportive, which, as wonderful as it was, also made Garfield angry. “It was like, ‘Wait—nowyou want to hang?’ ” he remembers. He started seeing a therapist and came to the conclusion that he and his father needed to hash things out. It was during these conversations that Richard revealed his own Hollywood dreams. Every time he drove his moving truck past the 20th Century Fox lot, he would wonder what was going on inside.
Both of them view Garfield’s performance in Death of a Salesmanas the culmination of all the work they did to heal their relationship. The play is, after all, the ultimate cautionary tale about how striving for superficial achievement can shatter father-son relationships. When the house lights came up on opening night and Garfield emerged for the curtain call, the whole audience was in tears. “[Andrew] locked eyes with me,” Richard says, and the two began sobbing. A photographer for the production captured that moment—Garfield onstage in tears—and Richard keeps a framed copy of it on his desk. He tells me he’s looking at it as we speak.
“Oh, wow, it’s really alive and thriving right now,” Garfield says, glancing around the park. He makes this pilgrimage every time he comes to New York, once a day if possible. It’s a portal back in time, to closing night of Angels in America, when he came here with the entire cast, back when his mother was alive, and said a prayer for all the people lost to the AIDS virus. The entire play, he explains, “is such an honoring of the dead, an honoring of the ancestors who were left behind.”
We find a bench by the fountain in the shade, take a seat, and continue talking until Garfield gets distracted. It appears he may have been recognized. I turn and see that there are indeed people clustered near us and whispering. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s like this hypervigilance.”
I ask him if he wants to go somewhere else. No, he responds, though he did just realize he’s got a hole in his pants, in the crotch area, of all places. He only hopes he was not photographed while man-spreading.
He wasn’t prepared for this type of scrutiny when he signed up to play Spider-Man. But who could have been? He envisioned himself as a different kind of celebrity: vulnerable, raw, uncensored. Easier said than done. He learned this lesson the hard way when he granted a brutally honest interview to New York Magazinewhile promoting 99 Homes, his film with Dern. Tabloids grabbed snippets from the piece and ran with headlines like ANDREW GARFIELD SNAPS IN INTERVIEW.
“It felt like, ‘Hey, let’s all gather round for this guy’s mental breakdown,’ ” he says. “In reality, I was nowhere near that. I was honestly just asking questions that everyone asks about life and existence and what matters and what doesn’t.”
It made him sad that a man being honest about his feelings seemed to make people so uncomfortable. He had already tried to handle the press differently while promoting TheAmazing Spider-Man 2, informing Sony executives that he wanted to do a “renegade Garfield press tour.” By that he meant visiting with local charities in every city the tour visited—in a Peter Parker kind of way. He shaved his head and shot a music video with Arcade Fire, joining them onstage at Coachella in drag. When he and his costar (and then-girlfriend) Emma Stone were hounded by the paparazzi, they directed fans’ attention elsewhere by holding paper over their faces listing charitable organizations that could use more support. They were all efforts to “keep my soul as fecund as possible.”
When Spider-Man: No Way Home was announced, everyone seemed to want to know one thing: Would he appear alongside Tom Holland, who took over the rebooted franchise after him? Garfield vehemently denied the rumors, which he found both stressful (because he hates lying) and exciting (because he was lying for a good reason—to surprise the audience). He even went so far as to deny it when someone leaked images of him and Tobey Maguire on set wearing their Spider-Man suits. (“Obviously, it’s Photoshopped!” he recalls telling people at the time.)
In the end, putting on that Spider-Man costume again felt particularly satisfying, Garfield says, given that his participation in the franchise was “left dangling” when The Amazing Spider-Man 3was shelved by Sony amid disappointing results for the second film. “It was really healing for me,” he says. Would he ever do it again? “For sure, I would 100 percent come back if it was the right thing, if it’s additive to the culture, if there’s a great concept or something that hasn’t been done before that’s unique and odd and exciting and that you can sink your teeth into,” he says. “I love that character, and it brings joy. If part of what I bring is joy, then I’m joyful in return.”
Garfield also finds joy in communicating on a real, human level, and fame tends to get in the way of that. At one point, a man comes over to us and timidly asks, “Are you Andrew Garfield?” He says no, he is not, and sallies forth without an apparent second thought. He doesn’t want to be the famous guy in the park. He doesn’t want to be the guy who gets special ice.
He was once in a New York cab during the filming of tick, tick . . . Boom!and the driver turned around to ask him if he was “that guy,” then pulled up a picture of Garfield on his phone. Garfield agreed there was indeed a resemblance but told him, nope, he’s not that guy. “You could be twins!” the driver said. They proceeded to talk about their lives for forty minutes. To Garfield, it was “absolute heaven.” When he reached his destination, he handed the driver a note thanking him for giving him a gift that he really needed, signed Andrew Garfield.
Garfield really does like to connect. (As Dern puts it, “There is no purer seeker in life or art or profound friend anyone could have or meet.”) He’ll talk openly about the conflict he had with his father, the grief that he will always carry for his mother, his internal struggles to stop striving and to just be. He admits that turning forty and playing a dad in We Live in Timemade him think more about whether he’d like to be a father himself. But his eyes are wide open about how hard it is: “I’m already a tired guy. I don’t want to be a tired dad.” More important, even, he acknowledges that bringing a child into this world, into this broken culture that is obsessed with the wrong things, shouldn’t be taken lightly by anybody, but “particularly bringing new life into the context of my life, there’s a heavy burden there.”
The heavy burden involves being scrutinized by tabloids, no matter what he does. Despite Garfield’s attempt to arrive in N.Y.C. incognito the previous day, wearing a face mask, sunglasses, and hat, paired with tie-dyed sweatpants and an FDNY Ladder 8 tee inspired by the Ghostbusterslogo—a look that somehow worked—pictures of him walking through JFK airport nevertheless surfaced on fan sites and social media. Theories about his romantic relationships can devolve into fan fiction. Take, for instance, the notion that La La Landis based in some way on his relationship with Emma Stone. Once Hollywood’s golden couple, they reportedly broke up in 2015 and remain friends. “I guess people need something to believe,” Garfield says with a shrug.
But he warns me: “I have never, and I won’t ever, speak about or confirm or deny anything about my personal life with anyone, ever.”
After Stone, the press linked him with a series of glamorous women, including singer Rita Ora and model Alyssa Miller. At the time of our interview, he was reportedly dating a self-proclaimed witch. (With a barrage of headlines like ANDREW GARFIELD’S ‘WITCH’ GIRLFRIEND DENIES USING MAGIC TO SEDUCE THE ACTOR in the New York Post, can you blame him for not wanting to engage on this topic?)
It occurs to me later that the reason he’s so careful—why he finds it all so tedious and disturbing—is related to his ice problem, to his concern about our celebrity-obsessed culture. It’s part of why he’s thinking so hard about fatherhood. And he doesn’t do social media, because he feels “there’s no winning in that realm.” His reluctance to discuss his personal life seems to have less to do with him and more to do with regard for others, who will inevitably be dragged into the maelstrom that comes along with his celebrity. See also: He asks me not to name the acting coach he works with out of respect to another actor who works with the same coach and is more private about these types of things.
Put another way, he’s extraordinarily considerate of other people. It is not a bad quality to have.
Garfield is, in fact, such a mensch that he’s been holding my voice recorder in his shirt pocket (for optimal audio quality—closer to his mouth) this whole time. Then, after we make our way out of the park, he tells me about his “Tobias playlist”—lots of Nina Simone, George Harrison, and Jonathan Richman—and offers to give me a ride to Grand Central Station, where I’ll catch a train home. We hop into an SUV that’s waiting for him outside the park, and as we make our way downtown, he shares all the things he still wants to do.
Soon he’ll fly back to London, where he’s working on those two films at once. It’s the final week of shooting After the Hunt, and he’s deep into The Magic Faraway Tree. After that, he gets to shave his beard. (He can’t wait.) Eventually, he wants to return to the theater again, but maybe not right away. He’s still tired from Angels in America. Oh, and he wants to sing again. (Good news for Miranda, who told me he dreams of directing Garfield as Roger Federer, Andy Murray, or Andre Agassi; Garfield says it “sounds like a great time.”) He wants to work with more directors he loves, like Paul Thomas Anderson and Ruben Östlund. He wants to direct. He wants to be more joyful at work. He wants to buy a farm. “I’m craving . . . a closeness to the earth and nature and other people, local community,” he says.
But before he does any of that, he has a bit of an epiphany. “I think we just cracked something,” he says, “about the nonlinear nature of time being the construct that it is. And how, actually, things make much more sense when they’re out of order.” He tells me that in 2017, when he was nominated for his first Oscar (for Hacksaw Ridge), he took his parents to a pre-Oscars party, explaining that it would be a small gathering with Dern and her family. As they drove up to the event, Richard started to cry. Garfield asked him what was wrong. Nothing—it was just that they were approaching the 20th Century Fox lot, where Richard had idled in his moving truck with his Hollywood dreams all those years before. And now here he was: back in L.A., going to the Oscars with his son. The car slowed down and turned into the Fox lot. Unbeknownst to Richard, that’s where the party was. “I held it back as a surprise,” Garfield says, smiling.
The party was incredible. After noticing Mark Rylance at the bar, Richard went up to him and said, “My son really loves you,” then introduced them. (This was years before Garfield would bump into Rylance at the train station.) Lynne had a glass and a half of wine and wound up on the dance floor with Jack Black, who asked her if her son’s talent was nature or nurture. “She gets up in Jack Black’s face in the middle of dancing and tells him, ‘It was me! It was all me!’ ” Garfield recalls, his eyes lighting up from the memory. “Oh, it was a riot. It was so beautiful.”
There it was, that invisible golden thread linking the day when his mother suggested that he try something creative, to his father sharing his deferred Hollywood dreams, to Garfield taking him to that place he had always longed to go. And now here he is, starring in We Live in Time, putting himself in his own father’s shoes. It’s the beauty of small miracles, which his mother appreciated more than anybody else he has ever known.
Opening image: Jacket, shirt, and tie, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello.
Cover image: Turtleneck and trousers by Prada.
Photographed by Mark Seliger
Grooming by Amy Komorowski for Circa 1970 at the Wall Group
Set Design by Michael Sturgeon
Production by Ruth Levy and Madi Overstreet
Design Director, Rockwell Harwood
Contributing Visual Director, James Morris
Executive Producer, Video, Dorenna Newton
Executive Director, Entertainment, Randi Peck
Tailoring by Joseph Ting
