ESTA Best Actor winner Andrew Garfield on ambition and learning how to live

Andrew Garfield found himself crying three times during the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards.

The most awkward moment came just before he won the Best Actor award for his performance as Prior Walter in Tony Kushner’s Aids-era state-of-the-cosmos drama, Angels in America. ‘There was this wonderful actor who came on and sang “A Change is Gonna Come”,’ says Garfield, 34. ‘I was so deep inside my own head, and seeing this man have this Sam Cooke song work its way through him…’ Well, it captured something of what Garfield sees as the essence of performance itself. ‘It all feels like spiritual reaching for me.’

We are talking the day after the awards over rooibos tea at Electric House on Portobello Road. The Swedish actor Noomi Rapace happens to be sitting at the table opposite; the pair of them exchange greetings. Garfield is dressed for a hangover, in sweatshirt and jeans. If his conversation is a little floaty, he explains, it’s because he was up until 5am, partying with assorted thespians at the Theatre Awards after-after-party. ‘I find it pretty overwhelming being in any social situation that involves more than five people, to be honest,’ he explains. ‘But outside of my closest friends and family, the theatre world is the place where I feel I most belong. It’s the most welcoming community that I’ve ever experienced.’

There is something inherently funny about Garfield, and I mean that in a positive way. More like in a cosmic way. He has this fourth wall-puncturing thing going on that makes everything feel a bit absurd, not least the whole business of us sitting here talking to one another (‘Why are actors interviewed so much? There are plenty of other people who have more important things to say’). We’ve had the pleasure once before, last year in Hollywood, when he spent quite a bit of our interview chasing a fly around a rooftop, quoting the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi. He is earnest, giggly, not-quite-what-you-expect; his heroes are Mahatma Gandhi and Kendrick Lamar.

Over the course of our conversation his constant self-questioning and acute self-awareness gives the impression that his career is not a series of professional decisions made with agents, producers, artistic directors, lawyers, etc in London, LA and New York, so much as an unfolding existential crisis.

Still. What an existential crisis. It has already taken in an Oscar nomination (Hacksaw Ridge, 2016), a multi-million dollar superhero franchise (The Amazing Spider-Man, 2012-14), a lavishly praised Broadway run (Death of a Salesman, 2012) plus searching, stirring performances in Never Let Me Go (2010), The Social Network (2010), Silence (2016) and most recently Breathe, which opened this year’s BFI London Film Festival. Plus the recent announcement that the National Theatre production of Angels in America will transfer to New York next year. Baz Bamigboye, one of the judges for this year’s Evening Standard Theatre Awards, praised Garfield like this: ‘We can’t forget his call to arms, just as we can’t forget the blazing intelligence and raw emotion Garfield invested in the role.’ For Garfield, this was both the culmination of his career — and the biggest existential crisis of them all.

Angels in America, subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, originally premiered in San Francisco in 1991 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Garfield got to know the playwright, Kushner, personally in 2012 when he was in Death of a Salesman on Broadway. That production was directed by Mike Nichols, who had also directed the landmark HBO adaptation of Angels in America back in 2002-2003. It so happened that Garfield had ‘worn out the DVD’ while he was at the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama in the early 2000s. ‘I watched it over and over with my drama school friends. That and Eddie Murphy’s Delirious.’

Garfield was born in LA to a Jewish-American lampshade salesman and a ‘working-class’ English mother, but moved back to Surrey when he was three and was educated here, at the (private) City of London Freemen’s School for boys. He grew up loving hip-hop and skateboarding and remains close to his old school friends. ‘I was raised by parents with a very soulful perspective on the world and an inherent understanding that every human being has inherent worth and value. That’s a very privileged perspective that not everyone is given.’

When Kushner phoned him up and asked him if he fancied playing the role of Prior, the opportunity seemed too good to miss — he did have some reservations about playing a gay character as a heterosexual male but says he felt reassured by Kushner’s endorsement. ‘I read it out loud for a day in Los Angeles with some actor friends and spent the day weeping. I really feel it’s the best play of the last however many decades, perhaps even the last century.’ It helped that Marianne Elliott was directing the play (‘one of the most caring and generous people I know’) with a dream cast, too, including Denise Gough, Nathan Lane and Russell Tovey. He considers the National his ‘home theatre’, having appeared in a couple of productions there early in his career (Burn/Chatroom / Citizenship and The Overwhelming). Back then, he spent his downtime skating in the Undercroft. ‘I used to be able to kick-flip the Southbank seven steps — but I’m far too old now. If I attempted that now it would be broken bones.’ Besides, there wasn’t exactly a lot of downtime during the three-month rehearsal period or the four-month run.

Kushner’s epic takes in two separate plays, running to seven and three-quarter hours in total, and Prior is supremely challenging to play, both technically (it’s not easy being magnetically charismatic while also dying in bed) and emotionally (Prior must go to an extremely raw and unsympathetic place before reaching a state of grace). ‘I didn’t consider how hard it would be,’ says Garfield. ‘When I started, it was bliss. But about halfway through, I realised how difficult it was to sustain. Everyone’s in a spiritual emergency in that play. Even though we’re playing make-believe, your body doesn’t know it’s not real. I reached burnout halfway through.’ Halfway through the run, he found himself lying in bed at home until the absolute last moment, unable to face going through it all again. ‘I’d be dragged to the theatre kicking and screaming on some occasions. I have a tendency to the dramatic and I have a tendency towards the pathetic. There was a scary dissonance. I had felt, intellectually and viscerally, that this is as good as it gets. So, for that to be worn out of me, I felt guilty and ashamed. It’s never going to get better than this and here I am not wanting to do it.’

He thinks now that those crisis shows, painful as they were, were the best ones. ‘There was a surrender of self. That’s spiritual practice, as far as I understand it: it’s the basis of a fast, or a vision quest, or any of this plant medicine stuff that’s becoming very popular with people. Ego death. The aim is to get out of the way.’ This is a common theme with Garfield. I couldn’t help but notice that when he collected the award, he referred to the play as ‘a little bit like an acid trip’. He also disclosed last year that he had spent a very amusing day with some old friends eating hash brownies at Disneyland. (‘I really recommend it!’ he beams.) ‘Drugs…’ he muses. ‘The word has such a stigma. I can only really take substances if it’s a ritual. I mean, weed, I can smoke because it’s just nice. But with hallucinogens, I have to do it in a very conscious way in a place where I feel free and safe and can have a freak out if I want to. I want to be able to express my insights.’

Acting is not so different. ‘That’s what makes it so beguiling and so addictive. You get to be bigger than what you are. You get to hold more than you. You get this divine dissatisfaction.’ Naturally, this might not be your experience if you’re appearing in car insurance adverts or pantomimes. But Garfield has a particular feeling for spiritual roles. In the film Hacksaw Ridge (his Oscar-nominated role) he played a real-life Seventh-day Adventist who served as an army medic in the Battle of Okinawa. In Martin Scorsese’s Silence, he played a Portuguese missionary in Japan. And Prior is visited by angels and ghosts until he eventually becomes a prophet. ‘I guess I’m doing a dissertation. It calls to me and I call to it. I don’t think that’s going to change either — I think I’m in it for that.’

He is exquisitely sensitive of the debate that surrounded his taking on the role as a heterosexual actor. I suggest to Garfield that it would be nice to think that anyone should be able to play anyone. ‘I agree,’ he says, ‘but it might be naive of us: I mean you’re a white, heterosexual male, are you not? What’s being revealed to me is that now is a moment for listening rather than talking.’ He feels the shame of our shared English imperial past on a deep level and starts to talk about Les Blancs, Lorraine Hansberry’s colonial drama, which was revived at the National Theatre last year. ‘Danny Sapani was the anchor of this piece, this powerhouse of a black British actor, dignity personified. It’s all about white colonialism and how Africa has been deeply wounded by us. Afterwards, I said to Danny: “I know this is really weird and pretentious, but humour me. I have this impulse to kneel in front of you and kiss your feet and say I’m sorry. Can I just do that, as a ritual?”’ What did Danny Sapani say? ‘He was like: “Yeah, do it.”’ He laughs. ‘It wasn’t bulls***. It was a sincere impulse. That’s theatre. If the work is deep enough and the writer has transformed themselves through the writing, then they’ve got medicine for you to make your own transformation.’

You can see why he might want a few months off. ‘The leaves have started to fall. This is the time to hibernate and be fallow and in that reflective pose.’ He recently bought his first home not far from Hampstead Heath and has been doing a little windswept wandering in between his promotional duties for Breathe alongside Claire Foy. ‘She’s one of the best actors I’ve worked with. It’s so wonderful when someone gets recognition and external validation when they’re able to deal with it.’

He will spend the early part of next year performing Angels on Broadway (‘There’s still this part of me that says, “You have no business doing this. You have no right”’). And after that? He’s not entirely sure. ‘It will be different, though. I know that. I feel like I’m in the embryonic phase of a new cycle. I’ve been single-minded for the last 12 years or so. And last night was sort of the culmination. It’s time to think about other things now.’

For all his earnest questing, it has clearly taken a steely determination to get where he is today. ‘It took ambition, yes. I have been incredibly ambitious. But my ambition will now go towards something else. I think it might go towards how to live rather than how to work. If you know what I mean.’ I’m not sure I do: does he mean he’d like to find romance? Ah, but he shuts that down fairly rapidly. (‘I have no interest in talking about that in public.’) I realise, too, that I haven’t asked him about Spider-Man.

‘Oh that’s great,’ he says. ‘I think the less airtime Spider-Man gets, the better. For everyone involved. It’s so interesting how that always has to come up.’ He does, however, lend a kind word to his former girlfriend, Emma Stone, who won the Best Actress Oscar for La La Land earlier this year. ‘It was beautiful to see someone you love being acknowledged like that. I was so pleased for her.’

But no, it seems he means something a bit like Prior’s last lines in the play: ‘The great work begins.’

‘There’s been a need in me to reach a certain place. A real drive. And it exhausted me. I feel like I’ve exhausted this version of myself. Now I want to smell the roses.’