When news broke that Sony Pictures had reached a deal with Marvel Studios to reboot the Spider-Man franchise, they didn’t hesitate in replacing Andrew Garfield. While he’s yet to comment on how that felt (the actor has been nothing but supportive of Tom Holland), he has now talked more about the failings of The Amazing Spider-Man movies more openly than ever before.
While you have to believe it must have hurt the actor to be unceremoniously dropped the way he was, it turns out that Garfield actually feels free now. “The pressure to get it right, to please everyone… it’s not going to happen…You end up pleasing no one, or everyone just a little bit. Like, ‘Eh, that was good.’ [The films are] mass-marketed, like ‘We want 50-year-old white men to love it, gay teenagers to love it, bigot homophobes in Middle America to love it, 11-year-old girls to love it.’ That’s canning Coke.”
“So that aspect of it was a bummer,” he continues. “Especially for the group of us trying to infuse it with soul, trying to make it unique, something that was worth the price of entry. It was about authenticity, flavor, and truth, but at the same time, I understand people want to make a lot of money, and they’re going to spend a lot of money so the playpen can be as big as it was. I can’t live that way; it sounds like a prison, to be honest, living within those expectations.”
This is the most colourful language used to date by Garfield about his time working on The Amazing Spider-Man movies, and it’s not hard to tell that he isn’t happy with the way things were handled. The pressure of trying to make fans and regular moviegoers alike obviously got to the actor, as did the pressure from the studio as they threw more money at the sequel in a bid to make it bigger and better. It’s that which led to the failures of both Spider-Man 3 and The Amazing Spider-Man 2, so no wonder it gets under Garfield’s skin.
However, don’t go thinking that his time spent playing Spider-Man has put Garfield off from taking on another blockbuster or superhero role in the near future. “With a film like [“The Amazing Spider-Man”], there’s so much projection and expectation that is inherent in taking on a story and character like that. I was well up for the challenge, and I still am. I’m not going to shy away from something that a lot of people are going to see. Fuck it, bring it on, life’s short.”
SOURCE: The Playlist
