Spirited Away

Hanging up his Sider-Man spandex, Andrew Garfield reveals new depths playing heroic men of faith in Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge and Martin Scorsese's silence.

- John Powers

Behind the mask of every movie superhero you’ll find a serious actor yearning to peel it off. Although Andrew Garfield was a very good Spider-Man and Spider-Man was very good to him—making him world-famous and, as they say, bankable—the 33-year-old Londoner happily abandoned the red-and-blue spandex in search of something more satisfying. “There was something that made me go, I want to be training in a different way now,” he tells me over bites of curry at Café Gratitude in Venice, California. “I want to play at the feet of the masters.”

He got his wish, with starring roles in two of the holiday season’s most ambitious films. In Mel Gibson’s epic war movie Hacksaw Ridge, Garfield gives a stirring, big hearted turn as the real-life Desmond T. Doss, a country-boy Seventh-day Adventist who, though a committed pacifist and vegetarian, serves as an army medic during World War II. “He’s like Ferdinand the Bull, in that old Disney cartoon: The matador is trying to show him the red flag, and Ferdinand is just sniffing the flowers,” says Garfield. In Silence, Martin Scorsese’s meticulous adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s classic novel about Jesuit priests in a hostile seventeenth-century Japan, Garfield plays Father Sebastião Rodrigues, a Portuguese Jesuit who, along with a comrade (Adam Driver), faces torture, death, and a crisis of faith as they search for their missing mentor (Liam Neeson). It takes us back to a time when Catholic saints were, Garfield says, “the Kanye Wests of their day.”