There are performers who seem in constant effort to break the image that people have of a movie star. One of them is Andrew Garfield, who for years has claimed another type of behavior that is far from the egomania that is usually linked to Hollywood actors. The closest proof was at the last San Sebastián Film Festival, where even though the film he was presenting was the closing one, he wanted to live the Zinemaldia experience from the first day. He did it without a bodyguard and accompanied by a couple of friends with whom it was normal to see him walking through the streets of Donostia or going surfing in Zurriola.
Every time he left the María Cristina hotel, hordes of people who wanted to take a photo with him flocked, and yet every day he repeated the same routine. Going out without security, taking as many photos as he could and politely asking to be allowed to continue with his day. He attended a couple of talks with film students and on the last day he spoke to the press. There, as he has been doing for years, he claimed another type of masculinity. The movie made it easy for him. In Live in the moment ―which can already be seen in movie theaters― gives life to a man who considers these things.
He does it in the middle of a romantic drama in which he stars with Florence Pugh. A film that draws on the tropes of the genre – a love story where she has a terminal illness – and tries to contribute something new through a much more modern portrait of relationships, with a feminist and progressive woman and a man who It proposes new ways of being in a world where until now it had only had privileges. He does it in a subtle way, without overloading the inks, but showing that there are other possibilities in films that used to smell like camphor.
There is also a certain playfulness in “the ways in which the film develops,” which the protagonist defines as “new” and which consists of fragmenting the narrative, which travels back and forth, from the illness to the previous moments, making that dialogue with each other scenes that, a priori, would have nothing to do with the classic romance story: “It seemed to me that the form and content communicated with each other in a very interesting way and that this rearrangement of time, of captured moments of this relationship, we “It offered the opportunity to create a film with a degree of emotional complexity that many films that deal only with romance or illness do not usually achieve.”
Garfield, who was recently seen excited counting on Sesame Street How he coped with the recent loss of his mother, He is not afraid to be vulnerable. His character does it, he does it, and he claims it without hesitation. “I have many friends from my youth, and as I have grown up I have felt as if we were from different generations. I think that when men share things with each other, when we are emotionally open and available towards other men, life becomes much richer. “Life is much better when we are not afraid to reveal the most vulnerable parts of ourselves, the scary things that until now we have kept in the shadows,” he explains.
For the actor, change and the future happen there. “This is how we fully become the men we should be. In our lives, but particularly with our partners, whether they are the same sex or the opposite sex, or anything in between,” he says in a nod to gender fluidity and queer. “I think it is vital to do it at this time. If we do not incorporate those aspects of tenderness we will end up with brutal masculinity, and that seems detestable to me. And obviously that is what has caused most of the problems in our civilization that men have caused in recent centuries,” he says.
The people who hold power long for division to continue hoarding that power and continue presiding over the world in a very controlled way, keeping us at odds and divided.
Andrew Garfield
— Actor
He also claims another value, empathy, which he defines as “a bridge, an invisible thread,” and in which art plays an important role: “We are in a time in which people who hold power yearn for division to continue.” monopolizing that power and continuing to preside over the world in a very controlled way, keeping us at odds and divided. In violence with each other. Empathy ends all that. Empathy is the great connector. I feel that art has a greater responsibility right now to help us have more empathy with each other, but also with ourselves, to forgive ourselves and others in an attempt to be attentive to the invisible threads that connect us all in this “kind of mysterious community life.”
Garfield has built his fame around this new masculinity, and he is proud to teach it and claim it publicly. This may keep him away from certain types of roles, but that hasn’t stopped him from working with filmmakers like Martin Scorsese in Silence, and with whom it is rumored that he will work again in Life of Jesus. It is that fragility that made him an excellent Spider-Man, who did not catch on as he was not yet integrated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but which was vindicated in the last film of the saga, where the multiverse worked the miracle of bringing together in the same scene to the three actors who have played Spider-Man in the movies, a character who always praised the boy on the margins, the good guy in the class instead of the rebel without a cause.
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