WHO YOU CALLING A NICE GUY?

After years of playing lovable heroes, Andrew Garfield is wading into the culture wars as the villain in the Me Too drama After the Hunt.

- Ryu Spaeth

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THE FIRST SCENE Andrew Garfield shot for his new movie, After the Hunt, is an explosive encounter in which his character, a Yale philosophy professor named Hank Gibson, angrily confronts a student-who has accused him of sexual assault-in front of her teacher and classmates. Directed by Luca Guadagnino, whose films are known as much for their emotional extravagance as their impish button-pushing, After the Hunt is a Me Too psychodrama that dares to grab a few third rails, and the scene features a lot of yelling and door-slamming and students tearfully cowering. Garfield was feeling the weight of taking on such a fraught character. “I was very serious, just pacing around the corridors of that set,” Garfield says. “And Luca's like, ‘Darling, are you going to be like this all the time?’”

The role, which sees Hank touching women creepily and flaunting his disdain for political correctness, cuts against Garfield’s good-guy reputation. In person, his pleasantness comes through in gently insistent waves. He is soft-spoken and attentive and unflaggingly polite. He puts great thought into his responses to your questions, and when he’s finished, he'll smile a little smile to indicate I’m done talking now. May I have another? Even when he is dressed in Hollywood incognito—tinted glasses under a dark cap—his brown eyes somehow still absorb you in their benevolent depths. He says heartfelt things like, “I want to know people. I want to be intimate with people, and I want people to be intimate with me.”

He usually plays nice guys, too. As Eduardo Saverin in