Garfield, who has received career-best reviews for his performance in “Tick Tick Boom,” is spending most of his time these days talking about his other 2021 release. No, not “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” in which he played Jm Bakker. But his top-secret appearance in “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” in which he and Tobey Maguire reprised their roles as Peter Parker alongside current Spidey Tom Holland. And though he’s now able to talk freely about his performance in the blockbuster, he had to do some fancy verbal footwork during his previous press tours. Turns out, he liked it. “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,” he said. “And I kept imagining myself purely as a fan of that character, which is not hard to do.”
Garfield asked himself what he’d want, as a fan, and quickly came to a conclusion: He’d want lies. “I would want the actor to do an incredibly good job at convincing me he wasn’t in it,” he said. “And then I would want to lose my mind in the theater when my instinct was proven right. That’s what I would want.” Calling his months-long mendacity “thrilling,” Garfield points out that the stress of lying to reporters and fans for months was all worth it. “I was happy to do it, but it was a lot of work on everyone’s part,” he said. “It obviously gave people a big thrill in the theater, and what more do you want from a theater experience than a thrill?” Fans might have had an even more thrilling experience if they’d spent more time looking around the theater than at the screen on opening weekend, when Garfield and Maguire went to public screenings of the film. “I snuck into a theater on opening night and just watched with my baseball cap on and my mask,” Garfield said. “In fact, I was also with Tobey, me and Tobey snuck into a theater together and no one knew we were there. It was just a really beautiful thing to share together.” Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
