From web nerd to Spider-Man - Andrew Garfield talks about school days
By Baz BamigboyeLast updated at 1:11 AM on 8th January 2011
Playing the new Spider-Man is a fantasy realised for Andrew Garfield.
The actor, currently shooting the new superhero film for Sony Pictures in Los Angeles and one of the stars of the globally acclaimed movie The Social Network, always found Peter Parker (Spidey’s secret identity) easy to relate to when growing up.
Parker was bullied at school, and so was Garfield. ‘Of course, every school has their bullies, and when you’re a kid you wish you had the power to fight them and protect other people — and yourself,’ he told me.
On his bike: New Spider-Man Andrew Garfield riding his Vespa around Los Angeles
Garfield continued: 'We're incredibly cruel to each other as human beings sometimes. Bullying at schools is one of those huge issues I wish I had a solution to. I know how defining it can be to a person's life.
'What bullies don't realise is the effect he/she can have on someone throughout the rest of their life. It can form patterns in another kid and there's the trauma... It's really unfair'.
Living his boyhood dream: Andrew Garfield, seen here on the set of the new Spider-Man film with co-star Emma Stone, says it surreal to step into the iconic costume
He said he wished he better understood the psychological underpinnings behind bullying.
He said, however, that it seems to be a sad part of our culture and that most adolescent boys go through it as he did.
I asked him if he wanted his bullies to see him in his Spider-Man costume so he can go,'Well ,look at me now'?
Garfield laughed and told me: 'I haven't really thought of playing Spider-Man in the context of revenge upon those who bullied me. In all serious it's not a revenge move. It's a a role.
'But as a boy I probably wished I'd been bigger and stronger to help others and myself.'
The actor, 27, said he found putting on the Spider-Man costume for the first time exhilarating. ‘It was all so very surreal — definitely an overwhelming feeling of pure childhood joy.
Spider-Man was my favourite superhero. I guess I found him easiest to relate to. His struggle was profound, and I understood it.’
The theme of bullying finds echoes, too, in David Fincher’s film The Social Network — the tale about how the internet phenomenon Facebook was founded.
Garfield portrays Eduardo Saverin, a Harvard buddy of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s number one daddy.
Saverin bankrolled Facebook’s first faltering steps, through astute handling of stocks and bonds. But in the film, when Sean Parker (of Napster fame) edges his way into the growing Facebook phenomenon, he sees Saverin as an obstacle. ‘In the film, Eduardo was calculatedly bullied into leaving the company,’ Garfield told me.
‘Sean’s (Parker) perspective is that he needs mum and dad to leave so he can party . . . and Eduardo is mum and dad.’
The scene where Saverin realises he has been royally betrayed marks a highpoint of acting for Garfield, as he has to register white-hot rage and utter sadness at the same time.
Fincher shot the scene countless times and the three leads — Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg, Justin Timberlake as Parker and Garfield — are excellent. Those who haven’t seen The Social Network yet can see what I mean when it’s released on DVD and Blu-ray on February 14.
Garfield can also be seen in the heartbreaking film Never Let Me Go with Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley, which opens here on February 11.
Meanwhile, he’ll carry on filming Spider-Man until April and spend some of his spare time watching people skateboard and surf because, contractually, he’s not allowed to partake in such ‘dangerous’ pastimes.
Black Swan with a bright future
Breathtaking beauty: Natalie Portman as the tormented Nina in Black Swan
The actress is breathtaking in the picture, which is directed with melodramatic flourish by Darren Aronofsky. She will go all the way through the current awards season in a series of evening gowns designed to disguise her bump — because she’s pregnant by her ballet dancer fiance Benjamin Millepied, who did some of the choreography on Black Swan.
Trawling through past Oscar acceptance speeches on YouTube, it occurs to me that Meryl Streep was the only actress to pick up an acting statuette while expecting — and that was three decades ago for Sophie’s Choice. Natalie could be the next, because the Oscar is hers to lose.
She has worthy rivals in Annette Bening, Nicole Kidman, Michelle Williams, Lesley Manville and Jennifer Lawrence, but I believe Oscar voters will deem her the most outstanding for her performance as Nina Sayer, a tortured and obsessive ballet performer.
Black Swan originally started out as an All About Eve-ish story about rival actresses. But by the time Aronofsky first talked to Natalie about it, a full ten years ago, he’d shifted it to the ballet world.
Some — mostly balletomanes — mistakenly think it’s about the ballet, but the dance is used as a metaphor.
Natalie recalled an early script where her character was named Alexandra. ‘But she seems very much a Nina,’ Natalie said, explaining that in Hebrew, Nina means grace.
There’s also Chekhov’s Nina in The Seagull, and all the psychological and literary sensibility that association brings.
In the film, Nina has been pulled out of the corps de ballet of a New York company to play the dual roles of Odette and Odile, the white swan and the black swan, in a new version of Swan Lake. Pushed and pulled by a domineering mother and a bullying director, Nina self-destructs into a state of psycho-sexual madness, and the duelling swan personalities pirouette her towards tragedy.
I love the movie. I’ve seen it four times but I’ve had (and rather enjoyed) some ferocious arguments with American friends who aren’t fans.
Even Natalie and her director have had differences of opinion about what’s real and what’s not in the film. That’s part of the fun. Creating the performance of her career took its toll on the 29-year-old actress. ‘It was more difficult than anything I’ve ever experienced before. I like to go home and be myself but with this one I didn’t get the chance. It didn’t leave me.
‘I was barely eating, I was working 16 hours a day. I was almost method acting without intending to. I do wonder now how people can do this kind of role when they have a family.’
Did she ever feel she was going bonkers, like Nina? She laughed and told me she never felt she was losing it — she just felt exhausted.
I asked Aronofsky if he had to push his leading lady into giving a classic performance, but he insisted that it was always in her. ‘It just took the right role — I had nothing to do with it,’ he told me.
Natalie started ballet lessons at age four, stopped at 12 and resumed at 27. ‘It was like starting from scratch. I had co-ordination and could feel the music pretty easily but I had to re-learn the physical movements.
‘I love letting my hair down and dancing to rock and disco. Sometimes I so feel like doing what Meryl Streep did in Mamma Mia! — that kind of film musical,’ she told me, adding that she doesn’t want all her films to be serious ‘prestige’ films.
So much so that her next two are comedies. No Strings Attached has Ashton Kutcher as her leading man (she also executive-produced it) and another, Your Highness, was shot in Northern Ireland with 127 Hours star James Franco.
Natalie also produced Hesher, about an anarchic loner played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt which I caught at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. It didn’t seem the kind of film she’d get her hands dirty on. But she said she has never wanted to ‘fit into some mould of respectability and do the right kind of film’.
In fact, the movies I’ve liked most of hers have been a little dangerous: Garden State, the Hotel Chevalier short she did for Wes Anderson, Heat, and Luc Besson’s The Professional.
And let’s add Black Swan to Natalie’s brilliantly dangerous list.
Shifty business at No 10? Not again!
Getting into character: Ralph Fiennes will play a slippery Prime Minister in the new spy drama
Filming begins on Sunday on David Hare’s spy drama Page Eight, which also stars Bill Nighy, Rachel Weisz, Michael Gambon, Judy Davis, Felicity Jones, Alice Krige and Saskia Reeves.
Fiennes plays PM Alec Beasley, who is, officially at least, all about ‘liberal values and the price of defending them in a modern world’. But behind the scenes he seems to know more than he’s letting on about the Americans — and the black sites where they obtain intelligence by illegally detaining and torturing prisoners.
Nighy plays a jazz-loving intelligence analyst who becomes aware of a top-secret file — and the significance of what appears on page eight of the document. The Oscar-winning Rachel Weisz plays Nighy’s neighbour, who claims to be a book editor.
Fiennes and some of his fellow cast members were rehearsing with Hare, who will also be directing the BBC Films and TV production, which is being made with Harry Potter producers David Heyman and David Barron.
Carnival Films, the makers of Downton Abbey, are also involved. It’s not totally clear from Hare’s screenplay what political stripe Fiennes’s fictional PM wears.
He could be Conservative, but judging by the way he tries to screw over Nighy’s character, he could also be a Liberal Democrat.In any case, Hare insisted to me that it’s about what’s been happening in the world of British intelligence in recent times.
He said his film was a ‘realistic account of what I believe to have been going on in MI5-6 in the last few years’.
Nighy’s character, Johnny Worricker, is very charming, but also cunning and clever. Hare has told some associates that if Page Eight works, he might bring him back as part of a trilogy of TV films.
Certainly, Ben Stephenson, the controller of BBC drama, would be perfectly happy to have a writer of the calibre of Hare writing quality programmes for him that also attract A-list stars.
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Rupert Young, Siobhan McCarthy and Cassidy Janson will be joined by Mark Curry, Greg Castiglioni, Matthew White, Leigh McDonald, Steve Serlin, Julia Nagle, Adam Venus, Laura Main, Poppy Roe, Michelle Bishop and Katie Brayben in Stephen Sondheim's musical Company. Joe Fredericks will direct a new production at the Southwark Playhouse, with performance from February 2. The show was written in the late Sixties and opened in 1970, and subsequent productions kept it in that time frame, but Fredericks told me he wants to bring the story - about single man Bobby and his married friends - bang up to date. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Colombian Connection
Colin Morgan will appear in a black comedy called Our Private Life by Colombian playwright Pedro Miguel Rozo Florez, translated by Simon Scardifield.
Bang up to date: Colin Morgan will appear in the updated play
Morgan is a gifted stage actor, although he’s best known for playing Merlin in the BBC1 series.
Watch out for...
Drunk but delightful: Imelda Staunton will play an often-inebriated character in this funny play
Ms Staunton will play the often-inebriated Claire, who lives with her married sister Agnes (Ms Wilton), who resides with her husband Tobias in a WASPy enclave I’ve always assumed to be somewhere in Westchester County. Ms Cohu, so good in the recent production of Arthur Miller’s play Broken Glass at the Tricycle Theatre, will play Julia, daughter of Agnes and Tobias, who flees home after the collapse of her latest marriage. They break down like cars . . . she’s on her fourth.
Done well, this is a great play about fear: more fear of what will result if we’re honest with ourselves, rather than fear of what’s out ‘there’.
Long before the play starts, Ms Wilton will film some episodes of the second series of Julian Fellowes’ great ITV drama Downton Abbey. Work on Downton begins late next month.
Snowy setting: Ed Harris is filming in snowy Salt Lake City for a movie about money-making churches
There’s usually a lot of snow in Park City, but that won’t faze Harris. ‘I found walking in sand and snow very taxing when we were making The Way Back. The snow, oftentimes, was waist high, and when we were in the sand dunes I was sick.
‘I’d eaten something, and I had no energy, but that’s what the characters we were playing had to endure. I can handle snow and sand now, no problem,’ he said with a laugh.
P.S. Well, I promised to eat my hat...
... If the musical Legally Blonde ran for more than a year. And I've donated £100 to the Actors' Charitable Trust, which runs the Denville Hall care home for elderly actors. This money was meant for the theatre blog West End Whingers who, sickeningly, adored the show but I was afraid they might spend it on hard liquor.
Having his cake and eating it too: Baz admits defeat when it comes to the success of the musical Legally Blonde
Explore more:
- People:
- Julian Fellowes,
- Justin Timberlake,
- Michael Gambon,
- Rachel Weisz,
- Nicole Kidman,
- Ed Harris,
- Ashton Kutcher,
- Benjamin Millepied,
- Penelope Wilton,
- Bill Nighy,
- Meryl Streep,
- Carey Mulligan,
- Matthew White,
- Michelle Williams,
- Ralph Fiennes,
- Keira Knightley,
- Natalie Portman,
- Arthur Miller
- Places:
- New York,
- Los Angeles,
- Northern Ireland
- Organisations:
- British Intelligence
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