How can you soar if you're nailed to the floor?

The Andrew Garfield of it all

Andrew Garfield is everywhere right now, promoting his new film We Live In Time - teaching kids to act, on a Chicken Shop Date, and talking about grief and making the most of life. He’s been on the New York Times Modern Love podcast (gift link), talked to Anderson Cooper, and visited Sesame Street.

This isn’t the first time he’s had to talk about his grief while on a press tour. There are a number of interviews with him from the end of 2021 and the start of 2022, as the world was reeling out of lockdowns and into our ‘new normal’, from the promotional and awards campaigns for tick, tick… Boom! (TTB) where he discusses how he lost his mum just a little while before TTB started filming.

It’s always hard to tell how much of an actor’s sensibility is affected by the projects they’ve worked on, as opposed to leading them in the direction of those projects in the first place, but, listening to his appearance on Modern Love, I was struck by how much what he said reminded me of what I took as the message from TTB.

For those of you who are lucky enough to still have your first time watching TTB ahead of you, it’s a snapshot of a week in the life of Jonathan Larson, before he wrote Rent. Just like his main character in Rent, he’s struggling to make ends meet in New York, while seeing his friends get sick from AIDS and trying to make sense of it all. (I have to mention the incredible work Bradley Whitford does in the film, playing Stephen Sondheim - and there is a real voice recording from Sondheim in the film too, in the last film appearance of his life). The film is directed (and adapted from the stage musical) by Lin-Manuel Miranda (who names Rent as one of his main influences as a young artist), and, just like in Hamilton, you see the characters wrestle with the idea of running out of time.

Of course, the cruel irony is that while Larson was dealing with grief and anticipatory survivors’ guilt as friend after friend was diagnosed with HIV, he died suddenly at the age of 35, the night before the first preview performance of Rent. Andrew Garfield was already older when he played Larson than he ever got to be - I can’t imagine how that must have felt.

For another level of intensity to this theme of grabbing life by the hands, filming of TTB started right before the first Covid lockdown in March 2020. The cast and crew got back on set in the early autumn and managed to wrap the film in November of that year, with extraordinary levels of commitment and technical wizardry to make the film possible. In particular, to film Boho Days, the entire cast quarantined for 14 days, so that they could pack the apartment set full of unmasked singers (which adds another level to the joy on the actors’ faces in that scene). Likewise, for the ‘dream choir’ at the Moondance Diner, they filmed individual singers and small groups (in additional shots done after vaccines became available) on fixed spots, and then combined them all into what looked like a huge ensemble shot.

In the Modern Love episode (with Anna Martin doing an amazing job as host and interviewer!), Andrew Garfield describes a “longing to be here,” and it made me think of the fragility of life as expressed in TTB. Later on in the interview, he says, “We don’t get to be in charge of what we lose, how we lose it, and when,” and I fully gasped out loud on the train listening to it. In the discussion, he talks about ‘Onism’, the awareness that each of us will only ever experience one version of life. We can’t possibly read all the books, know all the people, go all the places - life is limited and fragile.

He calls himself a ‘sensitive little fuck’ and I’d certainly admit that that describes me too. As I’ve alluded to, I’ve had a few reminders this year of the fragility of life, as I know a bunch of you have too.

So here’s to grabbing life by the hands and making the most out of it while we can.

Speak soon,

Lily