Andrew Garfield
Andrew Russell Garfield known as Andrew Garfield (born 20 August 1983) is an English and American actor. He came to international attention in 2010 with the supporting role of Eduardo Saverin in the drama The Social Network.
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He gained wider recognition for playing Spider-Man in the superhero films The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), and later in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021).
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Andrew Garfield
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Andrew Russell Garfield
20 August 1983 Los Angeles, California, US
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| Alma mater | Royal Central School of Speech and Drama |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Years active | 2004–present |
Garfield has received two nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayals of Desmond Doss in the war film Hacksaw Ridge (2016) and Jonathan Larson in the musical drama Tick, Tick… Boom! (2021). He also won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for the latter. He has also starred in films such as Never Let Me Go (2010), Silence (2016), Breathe (2017), The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021) and We Live in Time (2024). On television, he took on a main role portraying Mormon detective in the FX on Hulu crime drama miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven (2022) for which he was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie.
On stage, Garfield made his Broadway debut playing Biff Loman in the 2012 revival of Death of a Salesman for which he was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play. He played Prior Walter in Angels in America on the West End in 2017 receiving a nomination for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor. He reprised the role on Broadway in 2018, winning the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play.
Early life
Andrew Garfield was born on 20 August 1983, in Los Angeles, California. His mother, Lynn (née Hillman), was from Essex, England, and his father, Richard Garfield, is from California. Richard’s parents were also from the United Kingdom. Garfield’s parents moved the family from the United States to the United Kingdom when he was three years old, and he was brought up in Epsom, Surrey. Garfield had a secular upbringing.
He is Jewish on his father’s side, and describes himself as a “Jewish artist.” His paternal grandparents were from Jewish immigrant families who moved to London from Poland, Russia and Romania, and the family surname was originally “Garfinkel.”
Garfield’s parents ran a small interior-design business. His mother was also a teaching assistant at a nursery school, and his father became head coach of the Guildford City Swimming Club. He has an older brother who is an NHS doctor at Royal Brompton Hospital. Garfield was a gymnast and a swimmer during his early years. He had originally intended to study business but became interested in acting at the age of 16 when a friend convinced him to take theatre studies at A-level, as they were one pupil short of being able to run the class. Garfield attended Priory Preparatory School in Banstead and later City of London Freemen’s School in Ashtead, before training at the Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. His first job was at Starbucks, being moved between three separate establishments in Golders Green and Hendon.
Personal life
Garfield has referred to himself as an “agnostic pantheist”, though he identifies as Jewish. Having completed the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola for playing a Jesuit in Silence, he said how “What was really easy was falling in love with this person, was falling in love with Jesus Christ. That was the most surprising thing.”
Garfield has dual citizenship in the United States and the United Kingdom. In 2009, he told the Sunday Herald that he felt “equally at home” in both countries and enjoyed “a varied cultural existence”. When asked again in 2019, he stated, “I identify more as Jewish than anything… I have a love-hate relationship with both countries and used to be very proud to have both passports. Today, I’m slightly less proud.” Garfield’s primary place of residence is in North London near Hampstead Heath. He told Shaun Keaveny on a podcast in 2021 that he considers England home as that is where his family and friends are.
Garfield customarily gives interviews about his work, but does not publicly discuss details of his private life. In 2011, Garfield began dating his The Amazing Spider-Man co-star Emma Stone sometime during production of the film. In 2015, they were rumoured to have broken up although no formal statement was released. When asked about his sexuality, Garfield identified himself as heterosexual but has stated “I have an openness to any impulses that may arise within me at any time.”
Garfield’s mother Lynn died of pancreatic cancer during his filming of The Eyes of Tammy Faye and shortly before Tick, Tick… Boom! began production. He was able to fly home to be there with her.
Advocacy
In 2011, Andrew Garfield became the ambassador of sport for the Worldwide Orphans Foundation. In October 2023, Garfield was a signatory in an open letter by Artists4Ceasefire to President Joe Biden, calling for a ceasefire in the 2023 Israel–Hamas war Garfield supports Palestine.
Stage performances
Garfield was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Los Angeles, and as a child he moved with his parents, Richard and Lynn Garfield, and elder brother, Benjamin, to Epsom, Surrey, United Kingdom. He began acting at a young age, joining a youth theater workshop and performing in productions. He graduated from the famed Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London in 2004. Garfield’s first stage roles include the Manchester Royal Exchange’s productions of Barry Hines’s Kes (2004), for which he won the MEN (Manchester Evening News) Theatre Award for best newcomer for his role as Billy, and Romeo and Juliet (2005). In 2006 he received the prestigious Evening Standard Theatre Award for outstanding newcomer for his performances in Beautiful Thing, Burn/Chatroom/Citizenship, and The Overwhelming that year.
Television and film roles
In 2005 Garfield launched his onscreen career, appearing in the British teenage television series Sugar Rush. After a guest role on Doctor Who in 2007, Garfield starred in the movie Boy A (2007) as a young man recently released from prison for committing murder when he was a juvenile. His performance garnered him a BAFTA Award for best actor. About the same time, Garfield broke into Hollywood feature films, appearing in the ensemble drama Lions for Lambs (2007) alongside Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise.
Budding onscreen career and breakthrough in The Social Network
After his Hollywood debut, Garfield performed alongside Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson in The Other Boleyn Girl (2008); Heath Ledger in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009); and Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan in the film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2010). He also continued to take roles on television, starring in the Red Riding (2009) series, for which he received rave reviews. His career reached international acclaim when he assumed the role of Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network (2010), a film about Facebook’s founding. He received nominations for both a BAFTA Award and a Golden Globe for his performance and was credited with “raising the emotional stakes” of the film by movie critic Peter Travers in Rolling Stone.
The Amazing Spider-Man
In 2012 Garfield signed onto Marvel’s Spider-Man revival, The Amazing Spider-Man, in the lead role of Peter Parker, opposite actress Emma Stone. They both starred in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), but subsequent installments were canceled because of the movie’s poor box-office performance and mixed reviews.
Years later Garfield made a welcome appearance alongside his Spider-Man predecessor, Tobey Maguire, and successor, Tom Holland, in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021). Critics applauded him for transforming the hapless teenage hero of The Amazing Spider-Man into the haunted middle-aged Parker of Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Film roles from the late 2010s
Other film roles from the 2010s include Desmond Doss in Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge (2016), a real-life World War II medic who refused to bear arms but managed to save 75 soldiers during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. Garfield received an Academy Award nomination for his performance. He also appeared in Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016), an adaptation of the novel by Shūsaku Endō. Garfield played Father Rodrigues, a 17th-century Jesuit monk who travels to Japan to find his mentor (played by Liam Neeson).
He took the role to heart, attending a Jesuit silent retreat in Wales and identifying the film as a galvanizing experience for his ongoing spiritual journey. Garfield also had starring parts in Breathe (2017), a biopic of Robin Cavendish, a newlywed who is paralyzed after a severe case of polio, and in Under the Silver Lake (2018), an off-the-wall neo-noir.
Onstage roles from the 2010s
In between movie roles, Garfield continued to act onstage. He made his Broadway debut in 2012, playing Biff Loman, the eldest son of Willy Loman (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) in a revival of Death of a Salesman. In 2017 Garfield starred as Prior Walter in the National Theatre, London, production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and returned to the role in 2018 during the show’s Broadway run. For his performances, he won an Evening Standard Theatre Award for best actor and a Tony Award for best leading actor in a play.
Roles from the 2020s
In the 2020s Garfield starred as a social media influencer in Mainstream (2020), Gia Coppola’s satire about Internet culture, and as Jim Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021), the story of the infamous televangelist couple. While Garfield was filming the latter, his mother died from pancreatic cancer, and he later spoke about how he was able to channel his grief into his next role as Rent playwright and composer Jonathan Larson in tick, tick…Boom! (2021). For the film, Lin-Manuel Miranda adapted Larson’s autobiographical script about his struggle to find success as an artist. Larson never had a chance to fulfill that goal while he was alive, because he died unexpectedly from an aortic aneurysm at age 35 in 1996, just before Rent became an international hit. Garfield received extensive vocal training for the film and was nominated for another Oscar.
In 2022 Garfield took on the role of Jeb Pyre, a Mormon detective, in the adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s novel Under the Banner of Heaven. He next costarred with Florence Pugh in We Live in Time (2024). The romantic drama, which is told in a nonlinear narrative, centers on the couple Tobias and Almut, the latter of whom has terminal cancer.
