Andrew Garfield on Tick Tick Boom, Spider-Man Return and Tammy Faye

A model of this story about Andrew Garfield first appeared within the Awards Preview situation of TheWrap’s awards journal.

Earlier than he starred as Jonathan Larson in “tick, tick…BOOM!” for director Lin-Manuel Miranda, Andrew Garfield’s go-to karaoke track was Will Smith’s “Miami.” The quantity was catchy sufficient for a crowded bar (“Social gathering within the metropolis the place the warmth is on/All evening on the seashore ‘til the break of daybreak”), but it surely was positively not a track designed to make you suppose that the man had the vocal chops to play a musical-theater trailblazer like Larson, who revolutionized Broadway with “Hire” earlier than dying unexpectedly on the age of 35.

“It didn’t require any talent, significantly,” Garfield mentioned with a smile of “Miami.” “It requires a vocal dexterity and a capability to inform a narrative, but it surely doesn’t require pipes in any method.”

He paused. “Possibly generally, late, late, late within the night of a karaoke session, I would strive ‘Finish of the Street’ by Boyz II Males, which is an extremely inconceivable track to sing. However I get very shy at karaoke.”

Based mostly on the proof offered by “tick, tick…BOOM!,” although, Garfield seems to have gotten over his shyness about singing. It took greater than a 12 months of finding out with a voice trainer, however the 38-year-old British-American actor absolutely embraced the world of musical theater by means of the character of the pushed, joyous and doomed Larson.

It added one other key position to a filmography that was already lengthy on intense and deeply felt performances (“Hacksaw Ridge,” “Silence,” “99 Properties,” “The Social Community” … ). It additionally joined two different memorable 2021 appearances: his creepily charming portrayal of disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and his (spoiler alert) return as Spider-Man alongside fellow Spideys Tom Holland and Tobey Maguire in just a few priceless scenes in “Spider-Man: No Means Residence.” And it plunged him into an area that he’d considered “this undiscovered land of inconceivable terror” when he was a younger actor showing in movie and in non-musical theater.

“If you have a look at musical theater performers, there’s a have to be so alive and expressive and virtually superhuman of their capability for power and breath,” mentioned Garfield, who in dialog is concurrently enthusiastic, considerate and loquacious. “Nice musicals demand of actors the entire scale of human expertise performed to the hilt, and there’s no shying away. It’s a longing that I’ve needed to specific myself in that method by means of singing and dancing —  you realize, I watch Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, and it’s type of the purest performative expression. And I watch Sondheim musicals and go, ‘How does he do this?’ And Lin knocked on that door for me.”

Miranda knocked on Garfield’s door as a result of he’d seen the actor on Broadway in a 2018 revival of Tony Kushner’s mammoth “Angels in America.” That position gained Garfield a Tony however didn’t show that he was able to singing Larson’s songs, however Miranda organized for the actor to fulfill with famous vocal coach Liz Caplan.

“It was a semi-secret audition, I believe,” Garfield mentioned. “They had been having a back-alley textual content chain happening whereas I used to be there, with him saying, ‘What do you suppose, can the child do it?’ And she or he backed me.”

Miranda’s schedule prevented the movie from starting manufacturing for greater than a 12 months, which gave Garfield time for vocal classes. It additionally allowed him to immerse himself within the life and work of Larson, a composer and performer who struggled for years to whip up curiosity in work that explored his life and people of his associates who had been attempting to create artwork in New York Metropolis through the AIDS epidemic of the Eighties and ’90s. The movie is predicated on (however drastically expanded from) a one-man present initially referred to as “Boho Days,” later renamed “tick, tick…BOOM!,” which achieved its best publicity when it was reworked right into a stage musical after Larson’s loss of life of an aortic dissection (a tear within the aorta) on the day of the primary off-Broadway preview efficiency of “Hire.” After his loss of life, that musical would win him three posthumous Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize.

“For me, one of many keys was that in case you watch him carry out, it’s as pressing as if his life trusted it, which it did,” Garfield mentioned. “And never solely his life, however he was singing for everybody else round him. He was singing for the lives of a technology misplaced to a different epidemic, the AIDS epidemic. His method of being a frontline employee within the trenches was on the piano. It was a reclaiming of the soul of theater for himself and his comrades.

“Clearly he was banging his head in opposition to the wall by way of getting paid for his work, but it surely was a stake within the floor. He was saying, “I’m going to spend my time this manner, and it’s worthwhile to honor the sacredness of the lives that aren’t being handled as sacred proper now by the tradition, by the federal government and by the world at giant.

“And that’s what it felt like whereas we had been taking pictures the one-man present on the New York Theatre Workshop. It was like sitting vigil. It was a really mystical, profound factor, a type of storytelling ritual of grief and even gratitude. It felt like a ritual of integrating and accepting loss as a part of residing and because the solely method of constructing life significant.”

The movie additionally focuses on a second in Larson’s life when he was not attaining success however was studying that the important thing was to let go of the concept that his massive break was imminent and easily proceed to work. It’s a lesson, Garfield mentioned, that may apply to each artist, together with himself.

“I used to be fortunate sufficient to start out working in earnest once I was 20 or 21, out of drama faculty,” he mentioned. “So it’s been virtually 20 years, and the phantasm that there’s any getting there began to crack for me after about 10 years. Then you definitely understand that no, I’m simply fortunate that I get to step right into a rehearsal room. I began to grasp that it’s the doing, the method. To not sound pretentious, however the work of a life is an unfinished artistic act.”

But when Garfield’s work is unfinished, it’s not for an absence of attempting. Earlier than making” tick, tick…BOOM!” in 2020, he performed Jim Bakker in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” a movie Jessica Chastain had labored to get off the bottom for nearly a decade. And whereas he speaks glowingly of collaborating with Chastain, who performs Tammy Faye Bakker, he was extra troubled about taking over the position of a person who preached the gospel of prosperity whereas paying hush cash to a girl who accused him of rape, and who was despatched to jail in 1988 for defrauding traders and utilizing ministry funds to bankroll his lavish life-style.

“Oh, it was so painful,” he mentioned of the position. “It was so, so uncomfortable as a result of he’s so uncomfortable. He’s in a lot ache, along with his conduct in direction of extra and never-enoughness, all shrouded in his personal self-delusion that this was for God. He’d suppose, ‘That is what God needs me to do’ to cowl up this terribly wounded little boy inside him that doesn’t really feel worthy.

“That is clearly simply my interpretation, however I believe that want for increasingly comes from an actual non secular absence. We’ve all recognized folks like that, and it’s on the rise as a result of we’re in a tradition that encourages that type of not-enoughness. We’re inspired to suppose we by no means have sufficient, which retains us nearly as good shoppers. I believe he was this epic instance of a cultural illness actually. And I didn’t significantly take pleasure in inhabiting that.”

However Garfield did take pleasure in his third 2021 position, which got here in “Spider-Man: No Means Residence.” The blockbuster hit makes use of the idea of the multi-verse to carry collectively all three actors who’ve performed the web-slinging superhero over the previous 20 years: “No Means Residence” stars the present Spider-Man, Tom Holland, but additionally brings in Tobey Maguire, who performed the position in three motion pictures between 2002 and 2007, and Garfield, who took the half for movies in 2012 and 2014.

The triple-Spidey scenes are gems of brotherly bickering, and Garfield did his finest to maintain them secret earlier than launch by relentlessly and vociferously mendacity each time he was requested in regards to the rumors. “It was somewhat traumatic but additionally weirdly fulfilling,” he mentioned of the deception. However the filming itself, he mentioned, was a whole pleasure.

“After they first requested me about it, I believed, ‘This may very well be unbelievable or it might simply be a stunt,” he mentioned. “It may very well be a spherical of applause within the theater and that’s that. However the place they wished to go and the place we went was so heartening. It was like, we bought to truly create a Spider-Man assist group!”

He laughed. “The dynamics in these scenes was life imitating artwork, in a method. I look as much as Tobey as this older brother determine — I need his consideration, I need him to love me and be impressed by me. And all of us really feel protecting of Tom. And so we labored on infusing as a lot of that truthfulness as doable. It was surprisingly fertile soil to work with.”

Along with his latest Display Actors Guild Awards nomination for “tick, tick…BOOM!,” Garfield now finds himself within the unusual state of affairs of going up in opposition to the man who had offered him along with his karaoke tune of selection, Will Smith. “I imply, gosh,” he mentioned. “How do you even start to compute that?”  

And it additionally raises one other query: Now that he’s made his mark as a musical-theater icon, is his new karaoke go-to going to alter from Smith’s rap track to a present tune?

“It higher,” he mentioned. “I’ve bought to determine that out.” Then he paused. “Possibly it’s good that we will’t do issues in particular person for some time, as a result of no person needs to listen to me doing Stephen Sondheim.”

Learn extra from the Awards Preview situation right here.