Andrew Garfield Breaks Down in Tears While Reading Devastating Essay on Love and Loss
Andrew Garfield appeared on the 'Modern Love' podcast where he talked vulnerably about love, loss of loved ones, and grief.
The 41-year-old read aloud the Modern Love essay by Chris Huntington titled "Learning to Measure Time in Love and Loss" during the podcast published Wednesday, October 9.
The Los Angeles, California, native was so moved by the essay "that he spoke in a surprisingly raw way with the host Anna Martin about the need for art to crack us all open, including himself," according to the episode's description.
"I think what's hitting me — I don't know, I don't know, it's the preciousness," he began through tears. "It's the preciousness we've been talking about."
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"And it's the longing for more, it's like, we all live, we all pass, with so much more to know, with so much more longing. I don't know why it's affecting me so deeply, but I feel this man's writing," the 'Spider-Man: No Way Home' star choked up. "For all of us it feels like he's tapping into something so universal — a longing to be here and there are moments in our film when I watched it in Toronto with an audience, where all I saw was in those quiet moments particularly after a diagnosis or something, something heavy, all I saw was two people who want to live. They're not asking for much they just want their fair shot at creating a life."
He added how he "thinks that's all of us. I think we all just want a fair shot at creating a life."
The film he was referring to was 'We Live in Time,' a romance drama that follows "an up-and-coming chef and a recent divorcée find their lives forever changed when a chance encounter brings them together, in a decade-spanning, deeply moving romance," per iMDB.
The John Crowley directed film, which also stars Florence Pugh, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 6, 2024.
It's scheduled to be released by StudioCanal in the United Kingdom on January 1, 2025.
Garfield has also been candid about his grief after his mother, Linda, died of pancreatic cancer in 2019.
"My mother's qualities that were the most kind of obvious, or apparent, were a gentleness, a kindness, a generosity," Garfield told CNN's Anderson Cooper on the 'All There Is' podcast. "On her hospice bed, she was more concerned with the nurses than she was with her own pain and discomfort. She was that kind of person."
He continued: "I hope this grief stays with me, because it's all the unexpressed love that I didn't get to tell her, and I told her every day. She was the best of us."
"There's a burgeoning awareness of time being short and conditional and therefore every single moment feels very sacred, tiny little moments, big expansive moments. It's like a meditation on the shortness and sacredness of life and it feels like every scene is a grief scene," Garfield said of the story. "It's a beautiful film, it was beautiful to inhabit, and it feels meditative, and it feels very wise, and it feels full of rage as well, raging against the dying of the light."
