New romantic tear-jerker We Live in Time (out in Australia in January) tells a non-linear love story of a young couple navigating life with a cancer diagnosis.
While the plot has audiences with tissues at the ready, Andrew Garfield’s raw emotion while promoting the film, co-starring Florence Pugh, has already moved many to tears.
Appearing on The New York Times podcast Modern Love released on October 9, Garfield choked up while reading the essay ‘Learning to Measure Time in Love and Loss’ by Chris Huntington.
“It’s mysterious. This is why art is so important because it can get us to places that we can’t get to any other way,” he answered when asked what made him cry.
“There are moments in our film, when I watched it in Toronto with an audience, where all I saw – it was in the quiet moments – particularly after a diagnosis or something heavy, all I saw was two people that want to live. They’re not asking for much, they just want their fair shot at creating a life. I think that’s all of us. I think we all just want a fair shot at creating a life.”
Garfield’s world view shifted after he lost his mother, Lynn, to pancreatic cancer in 2019, leading him to press pause on his career at a high point, having just starred in the 2021 blockbuster Spider-Man: No Way Home and scored his second Oscar nomination in 2022 for Tick Tick… Boom!
“I was just in a bit of a shift, transition, change in my life, processing a lot, feeling a lot, changing my relationship to the world,” he told Town & Country magazine.
“Maybe I was too young to be having midlife crisis, but there was something of, having lost my mother, having achieved a certain amount that I wanted to achieve in my work, having a life that I loved. And yet, in the wake of all of that, it was like a plateau. It was like, ‘What now? And who am I? And what does it all mean? What matters? What doesn’t?’ Like something was being rearranged without my consent.”
Garfield struggled to find the desire to work. “A lot of my ambition died to a certain degree – or died in order to be reborn in a different way,” he explained.
Then along came the script for We Live in Time and Garfield felt the stars align.
Once Pugh was on board, he said, “It was like, ‘F–k, I guess we have to do it then,’ because she is one of those rare birds, one of those rare talents. And that was that.”
As well as believing the role would form part of the process he was going through, he also hoped that his healing would be felt by the audience as well.
“I thought, ‘Oh this is some version of the inside of my own heart right now,’” he told Hello magazine.
“For me, this process didn’t feel like digging up old wounds, it felt very healing. It actually felt as though it helped me stay close to the truth of my grief, the truth of my longings, the truth of my joys. It was a beautiful, healing thing.”
In talking about living with loss, Garfield hopes to help others, including the younger generation, by appearing in a viral video having a vulnerable chat with Elmo from Sesame Street about missing his mum.
“It’s actually kind of OK to miss somebody,” he tells the empathetic muppet.
“That sadness, it’s kind of a gift. It’s kind of a lovely thing to feel, in a way, because it means you really loved somebody when you miss them.”
Garfield, who will next co-star with Julia Roberts in After the Hunt and is set to appear in the film adaptation of children’s story The Magic Faraway Tree, says making We Live in Time has clarified his purpose.
“I just feel this urgency,” he said in an interview with Bustle magazine.
“I feel like I’m middle-aged now. I’m 41. And it’s like – time is ticking. I feel it more acutely than ever. It’s a day-in day-out practice of trying to suck all the life out that we can while we’re here, because yeah, it’s urgent.”
