The 'Amazing' Andrew Garfield suits up for 'Spider-Man' - The Star-Ledger - NJ.com

Jaimie TruebloodAndrew Garfield, the new Spider-Man. Garfield was done filming 'The Amazing Spider-Man' when filmmakers changed a key part of Peter Parker's backstory.

The world’s newest superhero isn’t feeling too super.

It’s Andrew Garfield’s third straight day of one-on-one interviews, TV spots and news conferences for “The Amazing Spider-Man” â€" in between rehearsals for the next night’s Tony Awards â€" and he’s hit the wall. Hoarse and bleary eyed, he can barely keep going.

The only thing carrying him through, he confides at the end of the day, is knowing that, “this is it. The film is finished, and I know I’ve worked hard and now I just have to sort of surrender and let it go. It’s a relief, actually. The movie’s on its own, now.”

But Garfield’s ride is just beginning.

It picked up speed early. After just five years of very good performances in rather small movies, he caught fire as Mark Zuckerberg’s betrayed friend in “The Social Network.” Then came Biff in the Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman,” which won him that Tony nomination (he lost, in the end, to Christian Borle, for “Peter and the Starcatcher”).

But that was just prologue.

More people will probably see “The Amazing Spider-Man” in its opening week than saw “The Social Network” during its entire run. Add in a fan-mag-ready romance with co-star Emma Stone and you don’t need Spidey-sense to know the 28-year-old actor’s life is about to change, and change utterly.

Those who’ve worked with him, though, aren’t worried.

“I never once saw or considered Andrew or Emma as kids, or virgins to the dubious craft of acting,” says Rhys Ifans, who plays the film’s green-skinned villain. “In fact, I was more often than not humbled by their performances. Andrew in particular â€" the one he’s given as Spider-Man, the complexity and intelligence and even poetry, I think it’s just a phenomenal performance.”

“The first couple of days was getting used to the idea these two kids were going to steal the movie from me and Rhys,” jokes Denis Leary, who plays Stone’s father in the film â€" and says he found himself out-acted in his first few takes with Garfield. “They’re the real deal and they’re going to be around for a long time.”

So yes, Andrew Garfield has arrived. A brand-new brand name, he’s sure to be pitched every project in town, whether he’s right for them or not. And that prospect absolutely terrifies him.

He actually likes auditions, he insists. He wants to get parts because he’s right for them not because of any “certain level of notoriety” he’s suddenly accrued.

Not that he doesn’t appreciate how far and fast he’s come. Born in Los Angeles to an American father and British mother, Garfield grew up in Surrey. Determinedly athletic, impossibly skinny, he remembers brutal games of rugby that left him bleeding in the mud. “I was always sort of the underdog, the weakling,” he says.

And yet he always came back for more.

“Always give your all,” he says. “My dad gave me that ethic â€" he’s a great motivational guy, a swim coach now, and he really instilled that in me. It’s how I look at acting, too. We love this, we’re getting paid to do what we love, so let’s suck every bit of juice out of it that we can. Otherwise, why are we here?”

Merrick MortonGarfield, left, with Jesse Eisenberg in "The Social Network."

His sensitive side

And it was acting, not sports, that Garfield eventually focused on.

“When I was a kid, I always felt ashamed of how sensitive I was,” he says. “Emotionally sensitive, physically sensitive â€" I swear, even my hair was sensitive. I got emotional very easily, and I felt a great deal of shame about that. But when I began acting, I realized I could take that sensitivity and put it to good use.”

Garfield went to drama school, and began doing stage work like “Romeo and Juliet” and British TV shows like “Dr. Who.” But he soon pushed to do even darker, less romantic stuff.

In his first film, the chilling “Boy A,” he played a violent youthful offender; in the epic “Red Riding” trilogy, he’s a small-town reporter obsessed with a bizarre murder. And in the sci-fi “Never Let Me Go,” he’s a clone, raised as a source for “harvested” organs.

None of the films made much of a mark in the United States. Then, Garfield landed “The Social Network,” playing Eduardo Savarin, Mark Zuckerberg’s wounded pal and the film’s conscience. It was a grueling shoot, made even more grueling by director David Fincher’s typical insistence on take after take. Which Garfield ended up adoring.

“I discovered that kind of painful exactness really suits me,” he says.

There were different kinds of pains to be taken with “Spider-Man.” First there was the flying â€" some of it done, not with CGI, but with cables and derricks and Garfield actually swinging through the air, the way the lifelong Spider-Man fan had dreamed of as a child.

And then there were even riskier scenes â€" the romantic ones with his now-new girlfriend, Emma Stone.

“I actually felt more safe when I was swinging around because you have a very, very strong, thick pair of hands holding you up,” he jokes during a morning news conference. “The romantic scenes are free-falling in a way, as they should be. They have to be spontaneous. ... so they were actually more frightening than swinging around a building.”

Jaimie TruebloodActress Emma Stone, who in the movie plays Gwen Stacy, is Garfield's on and off-screen love interest.

The two young stars clearly have chemistry â€" but Stone, for one, can’t quite define how it began, or why.

“It’s hard to pin down what exactly it is,” she says haltingly, having preceded Garfield into a large room full of journalists. “It really is indefinable, it really is exactly what they call it, you know, it’s something else entirely, it’s just some soul thing.”

Garfield isn’t sure either, although later, up in his room, he can’t keep up the lightly joshing manner about Stone (“She’s terrifying!”) that he did during the morning events.

“In truth, if I have to say the truth, I think Emma is more talented than she can bear,” he says sincerely. “I feel she has the ability to do anything she puts her hand to. When she auditioned, I only knew her as a comedienne, from ‘Zombieland’ and ‘Superbad,’ but then we did the breakup scene and she just killed me, upset me, ruined me. And I knew then, oh boy, I’m in trouble, this girl’s got everything, she really does. If you spend any time with her, you find that out â€" being with her, around her, it’s a pretty addictive thing. She’s like the sun.”

You see, he really did play Romeo.

Yet it doesn’t sound like a line. As earnest as he sounds on screen, Garfield seems twice as honest off â€" talking openly, unguardedly about his career and the industry.

For example, he knows the rules for these big publicity weekends, the sort of complimentary boilerplate they require. Yet while Garfield is proud of the picture and gracious about his co-stars, there’s something about it that still bothers him â€" the fact that Peter Parker is an orphan.

That’s part of the classic origin story, of course. But in the script that Garfield shot, Parker’s parents simply disappear after dropping him off at his Uncle Ben’s. And that’s the way Garfield played the character â€" as a teenager angry at being abandoned. After the movie was finished, though, the filmmakers rethought that and added a quick insert shot of a newspaper headline saying his parents had died in a plane crash.

“It changes the nature of the character, to say after the fact, ‘Oh, he was orphaned,’ ” Garfield says. “It’s a very different thing and I don’t know that it’s fair for the actor, actually, to rewrite it in that way, after they’ve already given the performance. I do feel a bit violated, if I’m going to be honest about it. ... If it works for the audience, then it works, but it bothers me that they changed it.”

Kimimasa Mayma/EPAGarfield and Stone at a 'Spider-Man' press conference in Tokyo.

Avoiding the glitz

He realizes that this means far more to him than to anyone else. And he acknowledges that this sort of thing â€" obsessively re-cutting, re-testing, re-tweaking to minimize every risk â€" is just part of the way Hollywood works. The movie’s success is everything. And that’s one of the reasons why he doesn’t live out there, and doesn’t plan to.

“I asked Mike Nichols about moving,” says Garfield, who worked with the director on the “Salesman” revival. “And he said, ‘Why would you want to live in a city where you can tell your social standing by the way the parking valet takes your keys?’ It’s exactly like that out there and it’s a terrible way to live. So that’s how I plan to stay sane: Stay out of L.A.”

He’s based in New York currently, having moved out for the “Salesman” run; that’s ended, but the romance with Stone goes on, so he’s likely to keep an East Coast refuge in addition to his British home.

“I was craving a base,” he confesses. “Acting’s a nomadic existence and it really seeps into your conscience in a negative way. It was so lovely when I got to New York to actually have my things about me. It was the first time I’d unpacked my books in four years, and it was so soothing just to be able to put them up on a shelf and sit there and look at them.”

Yes, that’s right. He travels with boxes of his favorite books. Is it any wonder he finds Hollywood a little shallow?

He may never quite fit in. He likes to think of acting â€" sharing your feelings â€" as a “generous act;” he’s rattled by stars who act the diva, instead. “No one I’ve ever worked with has been like that,” he hastens to add, “but I know there are people who get away with murder. It’s an enabling thing, I guess â€" they’re encouraged, and once you know you can get away with it, you get away with it, unless you have a self-awareness.”

It’s a self-awareness he clings to â€" even more fiercely, as he stands on the edge of Something Big.

“I think, if nothing else, this experience will put the fear of God in me and make me keep doing things that are meaningful, and not just going with the tidal wave of whatever this film might bring. ... I want to audition for the Actors Studio. I want to keep pushing myself.”

And if, somehow, the Something Big doesn’t happen? That for some improbable reason that tidal wave doesn’t come?

“Whatever comes,” he says with a shrug. “You know it’s a great freedom when you finally realize you don’t have to be driven by fear of being seen as less than in someone else’s eyes, and you can just listen to your own heart. If you can do that, and at night, brushing your teeth, look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘Well, I was fine today, I worked hard, I treated people nicely, I could have been rude and I wasn’t’ â€" that’s really a rather wonderful feeling. And quite enough, for me.”

Related:

• Andrew Garfield: What you don't know about the new Spider-Man

• 'The Amazing Spider-Man' sneak peek: Super, heroic

• First look: Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man

• 'The Social Network' review: Facebook movie is great all around

• Even a modern spouse can understand Linda Loman's fears in 'Death of a Salesman'

• 'The Amazing Spider-Man': The reviews are in

• Watch: 'The Amazing Spider-Man' trailer