‘We Live in Time’ Star Talks Return to Film

Welcome back, Andrew Garfield. You’ve been missed.

The British star has done it all: shooting webs, making musicals — you name it. Over the last few years, however, he’s felt it right to take a break from the spotlight. Now, with We Live in Time set to close the San Sebastian Film Festival on Saturday, the Oscar nominee makes his grand return to the screen.

Garfield has dabbled in recent years with, for example, TV miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven in 2022. And who could forget his iconic appearance in Spider-Man: No Way Home?

This year, the star confirms to The Hollywood Reporter that he is ready to make a comeback. “I feel looser, I feel less precious, I feel more joyful,” the 41-year-old says. He has been surfing and eating his way around the Spanish coastal town over the last week, spending time with old high-school friends: “I’ve been a proper tourist.”

On Saturday, he won’t be a tourist. He’ll be on the red carpet with hundreds of cameras pointed at him, Florence Pugh on his arm. The two lead John Crowley’s We Live in Time, a south London-set romantic drama about an up-and-coming chef and a recent divorcée who fall in love. As they meander their way through life — and even welcome a child — they learn to cherish their time together when a late-stage cancer diagnosis rocks the happy home they’ve built.

The film is penned by Nick Payne, who Garfield admits was a big draw for him boarding the project. The actor found the “Hugh Grant, Richard Curtis vibrational archetype” of the movie rather charming. It also, he says, has been something of a healing experience after losing his own mother to cancer in 2019. “Every species of every living thing on this earth has lost a mother. Young dinosaurs were losing their mothers,” he says. “So in terms of my own personal experience, yeah, it felt like a very simple act of healing for myself, and hopefully healing for an audience.”

It isn’t the only feature Garfield’s been working on. The Magic Faraway Tree, with Claire Foy and Nicola Coughlan, is on his schedule, and Luca Guadagnino‘s After the Hunt, alongside Julia Roberts and Ayo Edebiri, is also set to mark a huge moment in his career.

Garfield spoke to THR about why it felt like the right time to come back into the film fold with We Live in Time, what audiences might be surprised to know about his co-star Pugh and the 28 — yes, twenty-eight — actors he named when asked who he would love to work with next: “I did a screen test with Ryan Gosling 20 years ago and ever since then, I wanted to do something with him. He’s very inspiring to me.”

What came first with We Live in Time? Was it Nick’s script? Was it John, or Florence?

It was all very, very hot on the heels of each other. I guess it was John first, in a way, because John was the the script bearer and I wanted to work with John again, since Boy A (2007), for a long time. And then when I saw it was Nick Payne as the writer of the script, that was an immediate, exciting prospect. I love his writing. I think he writes so sensitively and full of humor and heart, an amazing balance of things. I think it’s a hard needle to thread. And then it was me reading that with John’s directing in mind, and going, “Oh yeah, this could really be something quite beautiful.”

And then it was Florence, which was kind of a vital ingredient. Any two actors that did Constellations (2012) for Nick or this film, it would require a certain courage. Obviously Florence is just very inherently right for the part. It requires a level of depth, a level of rawness, vulnerability, and, I don’t know, a lightness of touch — but also an ability to go to the depths of the soul of the character. And very few actors can do that.

So it was all of those things, which kind of annoyingly brought me out of my sabbatical that I was taking but in fact, I’m realizing as I speak about it 1727552112, it felt very much part of my little break I was taking. It felt like I could continue the sabbatical while making the film. So this was just a wonderfully timed thing where I read the script and was like, “Oh, this is the inside of my heart right now.” And what a gift to be able to actually put all that to good use and create out of it.

Why did this rom-com-drama feel like the right moment in your career to re-enter the spotlight?

I wasn’t looking for a romantic drama. I wasn’t really looking for anything and it just kind of arrived. It was just the right themes, the right expression of where I am at, personally, being kind of midlife at 41. Whenever I say that to people, they’re like, ‘No! It’s not midlife.’ But I think that’s just death denialism. I’d be lucky if I lived to 80. I’d be so grateful to live that long. So I feel this moment of standing in the middle of my life — looking back, looking forward, looking at where I am — and trying to identify and feel what actually matters, where I want to be, how I want to be, where I want to put my diminishing time and energy. To make sure I can get to the end of my life and say, “Well, I did my best with what I was given.”

It just happened to be a romantic drama. And of course, a romantic drama is going to have life and death and love and risk-taking and courage and terror and mortality and dread and joy and exuberance and longing. This film is so full of longing. I watched it with an audience for the first time in Toronto [at the film fesitval], and it was a few quiet moments that really struck me about it quite beautifully and profoundly. It was like, “Oh, these are just two people that want to live.” It’s very simple. They want to live. They’re not asking for a lot. They’re not asking for the most extraordinary life. They’re not asking for anything unreasonable. They are simply asking, like all of us, to survive and to be here and to be able to be together while being here and try to make meaning out of their lives. That’s all I think any of us can can hope to ask for.

Are you firmly out of your sabbatical now?

[Laughs.] I think so. Yeah, I think I’m excited to work again in a different way. I feel looser, I feel less precious. I feel more joyful. I feel more aware. I feel established enough as a person in the world, as an actor within myself and within the world. I know myself well enough now to feel more enjoyment… I’m still a headcase — when I’m on a set, I’m like a dog with a bone and get taken over by some weird spirit that is never satisfied — but that’s never going to change, and I don’t want it to, but within that, I can feel a lot more pleasure and a lot more enjoyment, play and freedom.

I know that you and Florence have both spoken quite candidly about this film and how it ties quite intimately to your own experiences of grief and cancer. I don’t know if you’d be comfortable talking about why it was important to portray this on the big screen.

Thank you for asking sensitively. I appreciate that. Yeah, I’m not special in that regard. It’s garden variety in a way. And in my processing of my grief, one of the most healing and reassuring, soothing moments I’ve had, is realizing that this has been the way it’s been since time immemorial. Sons have been losing their mothers, daughters have been losing their mothers [since the beginning of time]. We’re lucky if it’s that way around, rather than the other. And of course, countless parents lose their children in one way or another too, I can’t even imagine what that must feel like. But I don’t have to imagine what the other way feels like. And it’s so wonderful to know how how ordinary the experience is in terms of how universal it is, while it is still so very, very truly, uniquely extraordinary to the individual.

So there’s something beautiful [about it]. There’s just lots of grace. And maybe I seek grace out. I don’t know. I naturally tend to. The only way to true joy, actually, is through terrible loss and acceptance of reality as it is, not as we think it should be. There’s so many moments, of course, that I’ve had in the last five years of saying, “Well, she shouldn’t have died. My mother shouldn’t have died so young, and she shouldn’t have died in suffering, and she shouldn’t, she shouldn’t, shouldn’t, shouldn’t.” It’s so arrogant of me. It’s so egotistical of me when I’m in those moments. And it’s human. I’m not shaming myself for it. It’s a human response, because it it doesn’t make sense, it feels unjust, it feels unfair. And then you take all those troubles to the ocean or the moon or the woods. And I believe that the moon, the ocean and the woods would all say the same thing, which is, “Yeah, I get it, dude.” Every species of every living thing on this earth has lost a mother. Young dinosaurs were losing their mothers. So in terms of my own personal experience, yeah, it felt like a very simple act of healing for myself, and hopefully healing for an audience.

Is that something that you want audiences to feel, coming away from watching We Live in Time?

I know it’s saying the most obvious thing, but when we go to a concert altogether or when we go to the theater, something about the collective experience helps us to feel less alone in our pain and less alone in our joys and less alone in our lives generally. So it felt like, “Oh no, this is part of what I’m on this earth to do. I love working with a group of people on something that matters. I love working with a group of people where we all get to bring our own woundedness to it and our own fragility to it, and see each other in our fragility and our woundedness, and say: “Me too.” Healing collectively is a privilege.

I don’t get to comment on how people respond, or how I want them to respond. I guess what I would want is for them to come in open hearted. Because I think we, as a culture, have been conditioned and led towards a more calcified, hardened state. And it makes sense, because the world is so divided and uncertain and full of trepidation and fear right now, and violence and ugliness. And we have such access to it at the drop of a hat. Right? We’re all terrified of being open hearted. We’re all terrified of saying the wrong thing. We’re all terrified of feeling the wrong thing, thinking the wrong thing, being inherently wrong in some way. But I think people that come and see this will, on some level, whether it’s conscious or unconscious, want that calcification to be cracked open.

I also want to talk about the Britishness of this film.

Very British, yeah. In the sex, in the food…

It feels very Richard Curtis. Can you speak to being on a London set and acting with a fellow Brit?

It was joyful. I haven’t had a chance to do it very often. Just being able to stay at my house is so nice and Florence being able to go for a run around Battersea before work. It’s heavenly. All these liminal spaces of locations that we were shooting on — petrol stations, NHS hospital waiting areas. You know, turnpikes, A-roads, traffic jams — like heaven. It’s the text we live in every day. To be able to honor that, and to live in that as these characters was really, really joyful. And the snacks, the Celebrations, the Jaffa Cakes and the digestives and the tea in the bath. To be able to lean into that Hugh Grant, Richard Curtis as you say, vibration archetype was just … yeah. And one of my favorite of his films is About Time with Domhnall [Gleeson] and Rachel [McAdams]. That film holds a very special place in my heart for multiple reasons. So when this came along, I was like, it’s About Time, but maybe a little more dramatic. They’re kind of related in some way.

Do you have a favourite pub in Herne Hill?

[Laughs.] Herne Hill is not my hood.

What is your hood?

I’m not revealing that! It’s northwest London.

Do you have any recommendations there?

There’s The Stag [pub] which is great, by Hampstead train station. Primrose Hill has the best bagel shop in London right now — It’s Bagels.

I’ve been. It’s really good.

It’s a little hyped up right now, but it lives up to the hype. It’s really good. Like, I have their merch and everything. I really, really love bagels.

Before we digress further, let’s talk about Florence. Had you met her before this project? What was it like building a rapport that so effortlessly translates into onscreen chemistry?

We had never met. I had been a long admirer of her work, since Lady Macbeth (2016). When John and I were talking about ideas for Almut [Pugh’s character] — because I came on first — Florence was top of the list. I’d been wanting to work with her for a long time, and it turned out she had also wanted to work with me, and it was fortuitous that our schedules matched up. And she was dying to make a film like this as well.

But obviously starting out with a mutual respect for each other as actors was good. But then there’s a whole big question mark of: are we going to enjoy each other’s company? Are we going to even like each other? Are we going to dislike each other? Are we going to find each other problematic in any way? With a script like this, we have to travel to the most intimate places. At one point, I have to have my head right by her backside while she’s on all fours in a petrol station, naked. That’s scary for anyone to do, let alone the woman in that scenario. And that’s just one example of the kind of the intimacy that we would have to feel safe going to with each other. And it wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t feel safe.

It was very, very easy to do that with Florence, and I think she would say the same with me. I’m so grateful for that, because I don’t think we would have a film that works without that.

Is there anything that surprised you about Florence, or can you share some sort of insight into her inner workings that maybe people wouldn’t know?

Oh, that’s a good question. I mean, a surprise I’m not sure, because I didn’t have any expectations. I was very, very pleasantly, like, grateful about how much of a professional she is in terms of the basic stuff — a lot of people don’t see as the basic stuff, like being on time, being ready, being prepared.

She’s someone who wants everyone to feel included. Whether you’re on set with the crew or on a night out or at a dinner party, she wants everyone to feel like they’re part of the gang. She doesn’t want anyone to feel left out. She’s very, very aware of people’s feelings around a table. And I think that was something that I found really touching and moving about her. And she really, really cares about the work. She really, really is devoted to her work as an actor.

You’ve done so much in your career. You’ve done the period pieces, you’ve done the rom-coms, you’ve done Spider-Man, the superhero stuff. You’ve done a biopic with Tick, Tick… Boom! I know you have The Magic Faraway Tree coming up and After the Hunt with Luca Guadagnino. What can you tell us about what’s on the horizon?

I’d like to get back to the kind of origins of making home movies with my dad, or making home movies with my high school friends, who were just in San Sebastian with me. We were reminiscing about the [fact] we had a production company called Budget Productions, which is “budget” but in a French pronunciation, like boo-shay. And, led by our friends Ben and David Morris, we would make genre films. Like we would just do handy cam, stop and start editing, in-camera, James Bond rip-offs when we were very drunk and very high, when we were 15 or 16. In between skateboarding sessions.

So it’s coming back a little bit to to that first impulse of like, we’re playing and we’re making something that is just joyful and fun. I was able to bring that to Tick, Tick… Boom! for sure. And then these last two [The Magic Faraway Tree and After the Hunt], even though they’re very, very different tonally and process-wise — one’s a big, sweet family fantasy film, and the other is a very serious, grown-up drama — it was still very, very playful. Luca is a very playful director. Luca’s like pure imagination and freedom. His creativity is this free, radical, sublime thing. And then Ben Gregor, our director on Faraway Tree, and everyone involved in that process, including Simon Farnaby, the writer, and all the actors, it was just this very playful experience. I’m really excited about both of them being in the world. I feel reinvigorated towards that feeling of putting on plays with my cousins and our best friends for our families over Christmas time or whatever. That’s what it feels like again.

I want to see a Budget Production.

[Laughs.] Let me see if I can… I don’t know. They’re definitely out there. I don’t know whether they’re suitable for public consumption.

It’s great to hear that it was fun working with Luca. Have you seen Queer?

He’s been trying to get me in for a screening. He’s only shown me one blowjob scene, which I thought was so genuinely beautiful, like it was such a beautiful love scene between Daniel [Craig] and Drew [Starkey] and it’s just so tender and full of longing. And obviously, graphic in certain ways. But I just thought, “Oh, I’m gonna love this film.” He’s such a sensualist and a humanist and in touch with his own longing.

Is there a genre of film or TV Show that you haven’t done that really appeals to you?

I’m considering all these things right now. I would love to make a film or a show or something that has the feeling of the stuff that I was brought up on, like ’90s, early 2000s. Amblin Entertainment, adventure, swashbuckling, Indiana Jones-style. Humorous, dramatic, romantic — a big crowd-pleasing epic adventure. That would be really, really fun to do. I was [also] thinking about great like films of Fatal Attraction, Unfaithful, Adrian Lyne. Like an erotic thriller.

Like Queer?

Kind of like Queer. Or Babygirl. But from what I understand young people want less sex on their screens! It probably makes sense because they’ve been exposed to so much insane, graphic pornography, accessible at the click of a switch that they’re like: “No more.” So eroticism has been killed somehow, because of the overtaking of pornography. Anyway, I don’t know. I want to go do theater again, do something on stage again. I don’t know. I’m very, very grateful. I also want to help. I think maybe the focus is more as well towards helping others get to where they want to get to. I don’t know what that looks like exactly, but I feel like I’m in a position that I can be a mentor to other actors and filmmakers and assist in that way. That feels like a good way to spend my time. It’s all up for grabs. Midlife is not so bad.

Midlife sounds great. Okay, who would you love to work with or act alongside next?

My God. Where do I begin? Jesus Christ. Older generation actors like Meryl [Streep]. I’ve been in a film with Meryl, but I’ve never worked with Meryl. Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Daniel Day Lewis, if he ever decides to work again. Robert Duval, Gene Hackman. I got the opportunity to work with Robert Redford and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Vincent D’Onofrio, Linda Emond, Sally Field. These are the people that I feel are the custodians of that deep dive of acting. There are other people, of course, in my generation and younger. I just saw Colman Domingo in Sing Sing — one of my favorite films of all time at this point.

I got to work with Zendaya [in Spider-Man: No Way Home], who is just wonderful. I would love to work with her again. I want to work with my friends. I’ve never worked with Eddie Redmayne or Charlie Cox or Tom Sturridge. Cillian [Murphy]. I did a screen test with Cillian once and Ben Whishaw, which was very exciting. There are certain people in the younger generation that I find really exciting as well. Obviously, Timothee Chalamet is just incredible. And Austin Butler is great. I’d love to work again with my friend Laura Dern. It’s really, really endless. I was so happy to get to work briefly with Ayo [Edebiri in After the Hunt], who I love, and got to do some real work with Julia [Roberts], which was a heavenly thing.

And Tom Hanks. That’s part of my dream as well. I would love to work with Will Ferrell, who I got to meet recently. Steve Carell. Ryan Gosling I would love to work with. I did a screen test with Ryan 20 years ago and ever since then, I wanted to do something with him. He’s very inspiring to me.

And how is it closing San Sebastian with We Live in Time?

It’s such a gorgeous festival, and it’s such a nice time. I came out at the beginning of the festival and, because I had a break, I brought two friends out from high school. I had always wanted to come and eat here and surf, so that’s what I did. I came out early and I ate and I surfed, and I was hanging with my old buddies, and we were just rambling around and cycling about and and eating our way through this city and drinking a little bit too. It was really, really beautiful. I managed to see three films. I saw Anora and and I saw Hard Truths which was incredible. I’ve really enjoyed being here with the backdrop of the festival. It’s a beautiful city, and I got to go to Bilbao yesterday, to the Guggenheim — holy shit. So I’ve been a proper tourist. I love being a tourist. I love a city break and and just walking, getting lost and finding the nooks and crannies of a place. So yeah, it’s been a beautiful time, and the reception from people has been really lovely. I’m excited to see how people respond to the film tomorrow.

A super quick question to end on. Did you know your TikTok fans absolutely love that scene from The Social Network? Where you smash the laptop and say: “Sorry, my Prada’s at the cleaners! Along with my hoodie and my fuck you flip-flops, you pretentious douchebag.”

[Laughs] It’s passion. It’s justice. I guess people on TikTok like justice, and they like outraged, righteous indignation and someone searching for justice — where Eduardo Saverin is in that moment. And I think they probably subliminally like seeing technology being smashed too.

We Live in Time closes the San Sebastian Film Festival on Sept. 28 and releases in U.S. theaters on Oct. 11.