Leading up to the release of Spider-Man: No Way Home, rumors were swirling about who might or might not appear in the movie. One of the actors at the center of those rumors was Andrew Garfield, who played Spider-Man in the two Amazing Spider-Man films released in 2012 and 2014. Now that No Way Home is out, Garfield reflected on those rumors in a new interview with The Wrap. Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen Spider-Man: No Way Home.
After months and months of speculation, when we finally sat down to watch Spider-Man: No Way Home, we were pleasantly surprised to find out that, like those tales about Luke Skywalker and the Jedi, that it’s all true. Garfield and actor Tobey Maguire, who played the same character in the first trilogy of Spider-Man movies, directed by Sam Raimi, appeared in No Way Home alongside Tom Holland.
Leading up to that, though, it was all rumors, and nearly every time Garfield sat down for an interview, someone would ask. Unlike Holland, though, Garfield didn’t want to develop a reputation for letting spoilers pour out of his mouth every time he talked to the press, so he lied–and did a pretty good job of it.
“[Lying] was stressful, I’m not gonna lie,” Garfield told The Wrap during an interview for Tick, Tick… BOOM!. “It was rather stressful, but also weirdly enjoyable.”
“It was like this massive game of Werewolf that I was playing with the journalists and people guessing, and it was very fun,” Garfield continued, referring to the party game where one or two players are assigned the role of Werewolf, while other players take on other roles and are tasked with figuring out who the Werewolf is. Garfield referenced this game a few times prior to the movie’s release as a way of deflecting from the question, too. “There were moments where I was like, ‘God, I hate lying.’ I don’t like to lie and I’m not a good liar, but I kept framing it as a game. I kept imagining myself purely as a fan of the character, which is not hard to do.”
“I placed myself in that position of, ‘Well, what would I want to know? Would I want to be toyed with? Would I want to be lied to? Would I want to be kept on my toes guessing? Would I want to discover it when I went to the theater? Would I want to be guessing, guessing, guessing?” Garfield explained. “I would want the actor to do an incredibly good job of convincing me he wasn’t in it. And then I would want to lose my mind in the theater when my instinct was proven right. That’s what I would want.'”
“If you’re the Werewolf,” Garfield said, referring once again to the party game, “your heart kind of sinks because you know you have a stressful couple of hours ahead of you. You’re gonna have to lie to your friends’ faces and try to convince them that you are not the bad guy in the game. But it was thrilling, actually.”
Now, though, the truth is out, with Garfield not only reprising his role, but getting some closure for the character as well.
“It’s been a rare experience to play that mass game of Werewolf with every single Spider-Man fan in the world,” Garfield said. “That’s been incredibly fun.”
