Andrew Garfield reveals ‘precise agony’ of losing his mother to cancer

Posted on February 19, 2022 by Admin

Oscar-nominated actor speaks of his grief and how it left him struggling to make sense of world

Andrew Garfield has opened up about the grief of losing his mother to pancreatic cancer, saying it left him in “precise agony” and struggling to make sense of the world around him.

The actor, 38, who was recently nominated for an Oscar for his role in Netflix biography Tick, Tick… Boom!, started filming just after Lynn Garfield, a teacher from Essex, died in 2019.

Golden Globes: The Power of the Dog and Succession win at celebrity-free ceremony

Posted on January 9, 2022 by Admin

Jane Campion’s Netflix drama and HBO hit triumph as stars distance themselves from Hollywood Foreign Press Association

The Power of the Dog and Succession were the big winners at an unusual, stripped-back Golden Globes.

Traditionally, the ceremony is a glitzy telecast with A-listers in attendance but after a year of controversies surrounding diversity and amoral practices, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association lost its footing in the industry, with publicity firms, studios and celebrities choosing to distance themselves.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: ‘Doing Hamilton every night saved me. It kept my head from getting off the swivel’

Posted on November 20, 2021 by Admin

When his Broadway show became a global phenomenon, the rigours of daily performance kept the actor and songwriter grounded. Then Disney and Hollywood came calling. Now, the ‘musical theatre fanboy’ has returned to his first love

About halfway through Tick, Tick ... Boom!, the new movie directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the patrons of a diner in 90s New York all turn to the camera and sing. The movie, Miranda’s directorial debut, is based on the autobiographical stage show of the same name by Jonathan Larson (creator of Rent) and tells the story of Larson’s late 20s as a struggling writer and waiter. Andrew Garfield is extraordinary in the lead, but it’s the people around him who make this particular scene; as the number unfolds, it becomes apparent that every extra in the diner is a legend of musical theatre, from Bernadette Peters, to Brian Stokes Mitchell (a veteran Tony award winner), to Roger Bart (original cast, Tick, Tick ... Boom!), to Jim Nicola (former artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop) to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Joel Grey, chasing the waiter for the bill. “I don’t know that I’m the guy you hire to make your next Marvel movie,” Miranda says, speaking via video from his office in uptown New York, “but I am the guy you hire to make this musical about a guy who wrote musicals.” It is simultaneously funny, moving and monstrously self-indulgent – or, as Miranda puts it, “about as musical theatre nerdy as it can get.”

Imagining Miranda as the steward of an alternate Marvel universe – Comic-Con, but for musical theatre geeks – restores him to what, prior to the opening of Hamilton in 2015, was his quieter role in the cultural landscape: as the champion of a much-loved, much-mocked art form that rarely troubled mainstream popular culture. Hamilton changed all that. The show not only won 11 Tonys, a Pulitzer, and more than $850m in box office receipts, it conferred on Miranda a singular status, variously crediting the 41-year-old with reanimating history, diversifying Broadway, and provoking children all over the world to memorise large chunks of lyrics about America’s revolutionary politics, some of them concerned with the restructuring of the national debt. (“Hey yo, I’m just like my country / I’m young, scrappy and hungry / And I’m not throwing away my shot” – still being hammered out at a million barmitzvahs). The most surprising thing about all this, perhaps, is that Miranda, appearing today in his customary flat cap and goatee, has the boundless enthusiasm and apparent absence of cynicism of the aspiring artist still untouched by success.

Andrew Garfield: ‘I don’t think I present as goody-goody’

Posted on November 5, 2021 by Admin

With his films Tick, Tick ... Boom! and The Eyes of Tammy Faye tipped for Oscars success, he discusses his inner malevolence, his mother’s death – and his ‘heartbreaking’ time as Spider-Man

Andrew Garfield is smiling beatifically and clasping his hands together as if in prayer. The pose suits an actor who has cornered the market in the holy and heroic, from a Jesuit priest in Silence to a Seventh-day Adventist saving lives on the battlefield in Hacksaw Ridge; from a man left paralysed by polio in Breathe to a credulous innocent who dies surrendering his organs in Never Let Me Go. He is a remarkable actor, but watch too many of his movies back to back and you are liable to hear celestial trumpets.

His prayer-like gesture of gratitude comes in response to my promise not to ask whether he and his fellow former web-slinger Tobey Maguire will be appearing in the new Spider-Man: No Way Home. “I appreciate that,” says the 38-year-old, speaking over Zoom from Calgary, where he is shooting the murder-and-Mormons series Under the Banner of Heaven. There seems no point posing the Spidey question when he has greeted each identical inquiry this year with a display of shrugging bafflement that may or may not be genuine. (Let’s see when the movie opens next month.)