By
Charlie Schmidlin
|
The Playlist
August 31, 2015 at 3:41PM
Marvel has wasted no time in looking after Spider-Man. Lead actor and director are locked down (well after the release date announcement), and Kevin Feige and co. are more than keen to show audiences their vision of Spidey after Sony's not so well received 'The Amazing Spider-Man' films. But as with the previous reboot, that leaves a creative team reeling after a half-decade or more of effort, and recently we learned the inner workings of that shift from one of the films’ key players.
Talking to the Playlist recently in Los Angeles while promoting Ramin Bahrani’s new film, “99 Homes” —his excellent first post-Spider-Man role since 2010’s “The Social Network”— actor Andrew Garfield spoke on his intense time in the comic book movie realm.
“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,” he said. “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.”
However, Garfield claimed that he feels more free now in certain ways than he during his time on the 'Amazing Spider-Man' films. “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 continued. "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.”
You can see Garfield next in “99 Homes” when it’s released September 25th, but keep an eye out for our full, wide-ranging conversation with the actor soon.
