The Self-Concious Foreigner

In one of his more current magazine interviews a lanky young actor openly describes how he, for his very first audition in the back alleys of Hollywood, watched the contents of his stomach escape him. Unlike many actors who would have been upchucking due to being nervous, Andrew Garfield admits that it was actually caused by an immense amount of typical exhaustion.  Even while he’s puking Garfield shows himself to have a very humanistic and genuine personality. When many young performers are just starting their journey of new found fame a common personality is typically what they try to create for themselves as to have more of a connection with their audiences. What Garfield has realized is that it’s not about creating common ground but instead about being as real as possible, no matter how uncommon it may be. In order to finalize his thoughts on the matter Garfield states, “I'm very neurotic and self-conscious. So I think that I'll know when I'm becoming a dick and believing my own press.”    

After being born in California and then growing up in England, he may not technically be a foreigner but in the beginning of his career he was definitely foreign to the acting business. So, Garfield attended the Central School of Speech and Drama in London and graduated in 2004. Garfield broke out in Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs in 2007 but took his acting talent to a new level that same year in a very different role. He used his self-consciousness to his advantage and portrayed the lead in the heart rendering film Boy A. His depiction of a young man trying to make a new life for himself after serving time in prison  comes out best when his character must experience his painful past being unwoven in front of all those he has come to care about.

However, Garfield's raw style of acting had only started rooting itself when, after filming The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus in 2009 alongside the late Heath Ledger, he took on the character of a human clone called Tommy, who grows to experience both the magnificent and horrifying features of humanity, in 2010’s Never Let Me Go. For his portrayal he has received a Best Supporting Actor Nomination for the 2011 Saturn Awards, alongside fellow rising actor Garrett Hedlund for his role in Tron: Legacy. Finally, as of early this year Garfield has been recently reenacting the well-known superhero Spiderman in the new film adaptation set to release sometime next year. He may be a little scrawnier than some would expect to wear the time-honored Spidey suit but I for one can’t wait to see how he takes this classic character into a new, darker and deeper mindset of emotion. 

Most recently, Garfield showed that he can create characters in a more realistic setting in 2010’s The Social Network. His interpretation of Eduardo Saverin, the young man who must come to terms that he is being left behind by his best friend during their creation of the infamously popular website Facebook, easily held up against Jesse Eisenberg’s lead act as the genius and traitorous Mark Zuckerberg. Although he was gypped from this year’s Academy Award Nominees for his work in The Social Network, Andrew Garfield is certainly an actor to look out for. Not simply because of his talent and wish to keep it subtle, but the fact that it will be interesting to see how his skills lead him to looking the Academy Awards in the face one day with an “I told you so.” Nonetheless, his immense self-consciousness and modesty would never allow him to actually admit such a bold statement.