Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Andrew Garfield shows off gorgeous body and six-pack abs as he gets photographed by Luke Gilford for GQ’s Men of the Year issue.
A few minutes across the border between Los Angeles and Ventura County sits a members-only club called Little Beach House Malibu, and in that club’s open-air dining room, on a balmy Thursday in October, an out-of-work actor sits facing the sea. Andrew Garfield – modestly bearded, dressed in white painters’ trousers, a logo-less black T-shirt, and your basic incognito-celeb baseball cap, whose brim he keeps tilting upward like the visor of a knight’s helmet – orders a cheeseburger with sweet potato fries, yellow mustard on the side, and begins to elaborate on what he’s been up to lately, which isn’t much.
“I’m in a real period of not-doing,” he says, cheerfully. “The usual aggressive, ambitious, driven heartbeat, rapping at the door has subsided for a while.”
The break he’s on now comes after 14 months of remarkable work, even by Garfield’s standards: Tick, Tick… Boom! and The Eyes of Tammy Faye. A surprise return to the role of Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home. An Emmy nomination for the TV miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven. To hear Garfield tell it, all this work has been challenging, rewarding, and unexpectedly satisfying – and all of it has been put in perspective by the loss of his mother, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2019. Over the course of a few hours in Malibu, he’ll bring up her passing again and again – not as a painful memory, but as a line of demarcation; an experience that’s broken him open in unpredictable ways, recalibrating his understanding of existence itself, and how fleeting it can be.
At some point in the future, he’s set to play Richard Branson, in a David Leitch miniseries about Virgin Atlantic’s feud with British Airways. But that’s a long way off. Whatever force has driven Garfield this far is, as he puts it, “hibernating, or taking a nap or something.” For now he’s taking time to enjoy other people’s work – he’s already binged hours’ worth of hard hitting documentaries, and has Jordan Peele’s sci-fi horror film Nope on deck for tonight. Only occasionally is he nagged by the sense that he should be doing more – like when he drives around Los Angeles, looking up at billboards showcasing other people’s projects.
“You start to go into, Well, what am I doing? Why don’t I have a billboard?” Garfield says, laughing. “It’s so stupid. It’s insane. It can be a really great fuel, but it can also be maddening.”
Did you have to carve out this time off deliberately, or did it just happen?
No. I didn’t, thankfully. I didn’t have to force my way into letting myself rest. [Bites burger] It was interesting. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, the reason for this weird peace I’ve been experiencing. I think the loss of my mum was a big thing. That cataclysm is a forever-reverberating shift into a deeper awareness of reality. Existence. The shortness of this window we have. I think that’s working on me in profound ways that I’m probably not even aware of. Combined with a lot of output – a few things coming out at the same time, things I was really happy and proud of. We’re never satisfied, really, but there was – I don’t know – a semblance of satisfaction [laughs] that I started to feel, with how Tick, Tick… Boom! turned out, with how Angels in America turned out. And actually with how being involved in that Spider-Man movie turned out.
The next image sees him ditching the coat to go shirtless wearing only a pair of leather trousers reminiscent of Ross from Friends (if you know, you know).
In his interview with the mag, Andrew, 39, opened up about the pressure to have children by the time he reaches his next milestone birthday, and why he’s content doing things his way.
He explained: ‘Releasing myself from the societal obligation of procreating by the time I’m 40 has been an interesting thing to do with myself… where do I start with why it didn’t happen? It’s more about accepting a different path than what was kind of expected of me from birth.
‘Like by this time you will have done this, and you will have at least one child – that kind of thing.’
Andrew also discussed how he coped with grief after the death of his mother due to an illness in 2019.
Referring to theatre production Angels In America, he said: ‘That play, I think, really starts to just pull me apart. And then my mum gets sick. And it’s like, Oh, right. I was preparing for something. The person that brought me into existence not being in existence anymore.
‘I felt like it was all connected. She dies young. She dies at 69. Tick, Tick…Boom! Became this kind of place where I got to continue singing her unfinished song, to keep her song alive, somehow.’
He added that his father has ‘gone crazy’ as he battles with grief but is focusing on family and his love of gardening.
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