Andrew Garfield: Making 'Spider-Man' Was Like 'Canning Coke'

Andrew Garfield arrives at Hollywood Foreign Press Association Hosts Annual Grants Banquet on August 13, 2015 in Beverly Hills, California. (Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic)

After a four-year stint as Spider-Man, Andrew Garfield has passed his great powers and responsibilities along to newcomer Tom Holland — and he seems relieved that his web-slinging days are over. The star of 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man and its 2014 sequel, Garfield has been a passionate fan of the Marvel comics character since childhood. But translating that passion into a crowd-pleasing tentpole franchise, he told The Playlist, could be soul-crushing.

“The pressure to get it right, to please everyone… it’s not going to happen…You end up pleasing no one, or everyone just a little bit. Like, ‘Eh, that was good,’” Garfield told the Indiewire blog. “[The films are] mass-marketed, like, ‘We want 50-year-old white men to love it, gay teenagers to love it, bigot homophobes in Middle America to love it, 11-year-old girls to love it.’ That’s canning Coke.”

Garfield, who is now promoting Ramin Bahrani’s housing-crisis drama 99 Homes (in theaters September 25), went on to say that the mass-market aspect making the Amazing Spider-Man films was “a bummer, especially for the group of us trying to infuse it with soul, trying to make it unique, something that was worth the price of entry.” And while he understood how much money was riding on the franchise, the pressure to be profitable took a creative toll. “I can’t live that way; it sounds like a prison, to be honest, living within those expectations,” he said.

This isn’t the only recent interview to suggest that Garfield was disappointed with his tenure as Spider-Man. (The two films, despite high box office numbers, fell short of expectations for Sony Pictures.) Speaking with the blog Zaki’s Corner last week, the actor said that he never felt like he fully embodied the iconic character, and he “couldn’t rescue those films.”

“I was the actor that I am. The person that I am. Struggling with trying to match up with something that I’d elevated so high in my mind. Elevated beyond what I could attain, what I could achieve,” Garfield confessed. “The great thing is, that’s what Peter Parker was doing as well. Peter Parker created this symbol that he couldn’t live up to. It was never enough. He never felt enough, and I never felt enough. I never felt like I was able to do enough. And I couldn’t rescue those films…even though I didn’t sleep.”

99 Homes, which was well-received on last year’s film festival circuit, marks Garfield’s first non-Spidey role since The Social Network in 2010.