Andrew Garfield took the secrecy surrounding his “Spider-Man: No Way Home” role so seriously that he didn’t even reveal the appearance to former co-star (and ex-girlfriend) Emma Stone.
Appearing on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast to go full-spoilers on his Spidey return, Garfield confessed to lying about his reprisal to Stone when she asked if he was coming back. “Emma kept on texting me, she was like, ‘Are you in this new ‘Spider-Man’ film?’ and I was like ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ (laughs). She was like, ‘Shut up, just tell me,’ and I kept it going even with her it was hilarious.”
Eventually Stone saw the film and texted Garfield again: “And then she saw it and she was like, ‘You’re a jerk.’” Stone, of course, played Gwen Stacy opposite Garfield in the two “Amazing Spider-Man” films and Garfield and Stone were also romantically involved for a number of years. So if you’re a Spider-Man fan and feel bad about Garfield lying to you, take heart in knowing he didn’t even tell someone as close to him as Stone about his appearance.
Garfield, who reprised his role as Peter Parker alongside Tobey Maguire and Tom Holland in the Sony Pictures release, added, “I didn’t wanna tell anyone! I took it super seriously.”
When rumors began popping up that Garfield might be appearing in “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” which finds Holland’s Peter Parker opening up the multiverse, the Oscar-nominated actor deftly dodged them and lied about his return to multiple outlets.
Garfield previously told TheWrap that while he found the secret-keeping stressful, he eventually came to find joy in lying about his return. “It was stressful, I’m not gonna lie. It was rather stressful, but also weirdly enjoyable,” Garfield said in an interview pegged to his awards-worthy role in “tick… tick… BOOM!” But he considered the lying as part of a massive game, he admitted. “It was like this massive game of Werewolf that I was playing with journalists and with people guessing, and it was very fun.”
Ultimately, Garfield decided to lie in order to preserve the surprise for fans. “There were moments where I was like, ‘God, I hate lying.’ I don’t like to lie and I’m not a good liar, but I kept framing it as a game. And I kept imagining myself purely as a fan of that character, which is not hard to do. I placed myself in that position of, Well, what would I want to know? Would I want to be toyed with? Would I want to be lied to? Would I want to be kept on my toes guessing? Would I want to discover it when I went to the theater? Would I want to be guessing, guessing, guessing?”
That line of questioning led Garfield to his final answer: “I would want the actor to do an incredibly good job at convincing me he wasn’t in it. And then I would want to lose my mind in the theater when my instinct was proven right. That’s what I would want.”
The secret-keeping paid off, as fear of spoilers helped rocket “Spider-Man: No Way Home” to the second biggest opening weekend of all time, with a box office haul of $260 million. The film’s current domestic total stands at nearly $700 million, with a worldwide total of a whopping $1.6 billion.
All that and Garfield is also in this year’s Oscar race for Netflix’s “tick… tick… BOOM!” Not too shabby.
