Andrew Garfield’s emotional, personal connection to We Live in Time: ‘That, for me, is storytelling’

Andrew Garfield is great at sports.

As a child, he was a gifted gymnast before he quit at the age of 12. Then he took up swimming, skateboarding, surfing and basketball. With all that under his belt, you would have thought he would also be a natural ice skater.

“You would be wrong,” he tells The Nightly. “I am a bad ice skater! It’s one of the things I’ve never done well, and it’s one of the things I haven’t given time to.

“Florence (Pugh) was very happy because she would get annoyed at me because I get very competitive and I like to be good at things, and she was like, ‘I’m so happy you’re not good at this’. She was so excited to see me as Bambi on ice.

“I’m not good at ice skating, rollerskating or rollerblading, which is a shame because damn, you go to Central Park or Hyde Park and you see the roller skating disco crew and you’re like, ‘That’s hot, that’s sexy’. I wish I could flow with those guys.”

Garfield’s clumsiness on the rink means he didn’t have to “act” during a pivotal scene in We Live in Time. He was more concerned about not slicing a finger off than downplaying his natural athletic ability.

Directed by John Crowley, Garfield and Pugh are the leads in We Live in Time, a romantic drama about a young couple whose first encounter is when she, Almut, hits him, Tobias, with her car. As far as meet-cutes go, that’s a memorable one.

After a series of stop-starts, Almut and Tobias move in together and have a kid. That’s not a spoiler because the film jumps around in linearity and starts near the end of the story, when Almut discovers her ovarian cancer has returned.

The young family has to cope with what it means for their lives and plans, and the potential grief it represents. Almut, in particular, must reckon with what it means to live a good life and the desire to leave behind a legacy. It’s not as much of a weepy as it sounds.

Loss is something that has preoccupied Garfield, who has been very open about life-changing impact of his mother’s death in 2019. He is still processing his grief and We Live in Time is part of that.

“The movie was exploring everything that I was exploring at that time — love, loss, longing, grief, risk, vulnerability and meaning, just some small questions about how to live,” he says.

“I felt really lucky and privileged that a script arrived that was literally asking the same questions that I had been asking in my private life.

“What a gift, as an actor, as an artist, to go and deal with the very thing that you are personally reckoning with.”

But he didn’t see the film as his personal indulgence. For Garfield, that We Live in Time was able to help him is not as important as what it gives the audience, perhaps someone going through something similar.

It has to be for the community, it has to be for the tribe, for the audience, for everyone.

“You use your own material of your life experience, emotion, body, mind and soul, and you alchemise all that and transform it to give it to a character, and then give that character to other people to hopefully see themselves in it, and feel themselves in it and have their own catharsis through it.

“That, for me, is storytelling.”

Garfield doesn’t do things half-arsed. If he’s going to be Tobias, or any character he’s played, he needs to be fully in it, holding nothing back. He cites one of his favourite filmmakers, the legendary Sidney Lumet, who used to send actors home if the director felt they weren’t being “self-revelatory” on camera.

Another touchpoint was Sleepless in Seattle, which was played on repeat in his house. In the film, Tom Hanks’ character is a widow coming to terms with his grief.

“It deals in loss and it deals in love and it deals in the terror of loving after a huge loss,” Garfield explains.

“I love that it has grief in it as well, and the rubble of lost love.”

Garfield clearly feels things deeply. He’s thoughtful and open, unafraid of being seen as such. In 2021, his segment on Stephen Colbert made its way around the internet for the honest way he talked about his mum, saying he wishes his grief to stay with him because it represents “unexpressed love”.

Earlier this year, he also shot a clip with Elmo for Sesame Street, explaining to the show’s young audiences that sadness over missing someone who’s gone can be a gift. “It’s a lovely thing to feel, it means you really loved someone when you miss them,” he said in the video.

While he believes in free will, Garfield says there is an “inevitability” about the films he’s done and when he’s done them.

“I believe that we get to choose, but ultimately, the choices we make are somewhat, maybe, pre-ordained. Once it happens, it’s inevitable. So, there’s no choice but to say, ‘Oh, yeah, that was meant to happen at the time it did’.”

He remembers some of those moments so clearly, of the compulsion when certain things came his way, just like We Live in Time.

“I remember getting a call from Tony Kushner about doing Angels in America, and I was like, ‘Yes’ immediately, without having read the play in a long time. That was a no-brainer, we’re doing that, it felt very meant-to-be.

“When I read Hacksaw Ridge, I was like, ‘F**k yeah, I have to tell this story right now, I don’t know why but I have to’. Same with Silence, same with Spider-Man.

“It continues that way. Now I’m in a bit of a different mode, a bit of a different place, so we’ll see how the next chapter unfolds.”

We Live in Time is in cinemas on January 16