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Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to chat by phone for about 35 minutes with the 27-year-old actor Andrew Garfield, who is a best supporting actor Golden Globe nominee and Oscar hopeful for his performance as Eduardo Saverin in David Fincher’s “The Social Network.” Garfield’s Saverin is a cool, easygoing, endlessly-likable character who is always financially and emotionally supportive of his friend/business partner Mark Zuckerberg, but who lacks Zuckerberg’s singular focus, long-term vision, and utter ruthlessness, and is consequently betrayed in a most cold-blooded manner. (One almost expects him to say, “Et tu, Mark?”) In my humble opinion, he is nothing short of the emotional center of the film.

Garfield, a classically-trained theater actor, made his big screen debut in Robert Redford’s “Lions for Lambs” (2007); won a BAFTA Award for best TV actor for the British telefilm “Boy A” (2007); co-starred with Heath Ledger in his last film, Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus” (2009); and recently played the shared love interest of Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan in Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go” (2010) and the main character in Spike Jonze’s 29-minute short “I’m Here.” When we spoke, he had just flown back to Los Angeles from London for a short break from filming the movie that will soon turn him into a household name and internationally-recognized celebrity, the still untitled reboot of the “Spider-Man” franchise, in which he is replacing Tobey Maguire as the title character. Clearly, it is Andrew Garfield’s moment.

Over the course of our conversation — audio clips of which you can hear below — Garfield and I discussed all of the above, and much more…

• Garfield on his early moviegoing experiences/favorites
  “I never dreamed that I would end up doing it as a job… It was always something that I put on a pedestal and saw as fantasy.”

• Garfield on his process of discovering that he wanted to be an actor
  “Suddenly I realized that acting wasn’t just a vanity profession, and it wasn’t just superficial, and self-serving, and egotistical… I had this one epiphany — this, like, rush of understanding — of what the word ‘art’ means, and realized that for the last three years I had been training to be an artist.”

• Garfield on his emotional sensitivity that drives his need to express himself
  “I saw the trailer for “The Tree of Life” recently — the Terrence Malick movie — and I burst into tears.”

• Garfield on the experience — and after-effects — of making “Lions for Lambs”
  “It was crazy, the bracket of elite actors and technicians I was working with — it was insane.”
  

• Garfield on lessons he learned from working with Ledger and others on the set of “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus”
  “The majority of what I learned was from Heath and the way that he worked. He was very exciting to watch and to be in a scene with. He was very free, and very open, and almost careless, but not — he was able to do all of the really hard work beforehand and then arrive on the set with lightness… That was a huge lesson to learn.”
  

• Garfield on the year that changed everything for him — how his work on “Never Let Me Go” led Romanek to introduce him to Jonze, who asked him to appear in “I’m Here” and then, along with Romanek, recommended him to Fincher
  “Creatively, it was the greatest year I’ve ever had.”

• Garfield on Fincher’s initial invitation to audition for the part of Mark in “The Social Network,” and how he ultimately learned — and felt about the fact — that he was instead wanted for the part of Eduardo
  “I was always under the impression I was auditioning for Mark… I never read for Eduardo… I was like, ‘What?!’… It was shocking.”

• Garfield on the unusual demand for rapidly-delivered dialogue and multiple takes during the making of “The Social Network”
  “It was liberating, because… you let go… and once you let go, then you’re alive in a situation, and that’s when authenticity happens, and that’s when exciting stuff happens, and those are the kinds of performances that I like watching — the ones that you can feel being discovered.”

• Garfield on why he, a serious actor, wanted to get involved with a “popcorn” franchise like “Spider-Man”
  “I’m approaching it in the exact same way as I’ve approached anything else I’ve done previously. The struggle of the character is something that I feel passionate about expressing… I had an incredibly tumultuous adolescence… Spider-Man — Peter Parker — has always been someone that I’ve personally needed in my life… It means a great deal to me, and it means a great deal to so many young boys and girls… I’m just looking to serve a character that has served me throughout difficult times in my life and given me hope when I was needing it.”

Photo: Andrew Garfield. Credit: Connect.In.com

Tags: Aaron Sorkin, Andrew Garfield, Boy A, Carey Mulligan, David Fincher, Eduardo Saverin, Heath Ledger, I'm Here, Interviews, Keira Knightley, Lions for Lambs, Mark Zuckerberg, Never Let Me Go, Robert Redford, Spider-Man, Spike Jonze, Terrence Malick, Terry Gilliam, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, The Social Network, The Tree of Life, Tobey Maguire