‘I certainly think this film’s heart is in the right place’

Claire Foy and Andrew Garfield play doting parents in a new adaptation of Enid Blyton’s ‘The Magic Faraway Tree’. They speak with Louis Chilton about their decade-long friendship

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It’s been a few months since filming wrapped on the buoyant family film The Magic Faraway Tree, and its two stars have the slight air of having spent time in some kind of wonderful spa. “It was nice,” says Claire Foy, serenely. “I felt quite relieved to be playing a version of a mother that didn’t have to come with a whole side of trauma and grief.” Andrew Garfield nods. “I think joy was the priority,” he says. “It felt very, very different to whatever hell I usually experience as the character I’m playing.”

It’s true enough: Foy and Garfield - cast in Faraway Tree as a pair of benevolent parents who move their family to a ramshackle countryside fixer-upper — have been through the mill lately.

Foy comes to this off the back of films like H is for Hawk (a heartrending drama about grief), All of Us Strangers (another heartrending drama about grief), and Women Talking (a biting drama about sexual assault). Garfield, meanwhile, has recently been seen playing a predatory college professor in the spiky After the Hunt, and the husband of a woman with cancer in the superlative weepie We Live in Time. Even in the all-action Spider-Man: No Way Home, his remorse-addled superhero was doing a hell of a lot of crying.

Faraway Tree, then, was a welcome sojourn in more frivolous surroundings. Adapted and updated from the classic children’s novel by Enid Blyton, the film follows the Thompson family: Polly (Foy), Tim (Garfield) and their three kids (Delilah Bennett-Cardy, Billie Gadsdon and Phoenix Laroche). Exploring the local woods, the children come across a transportive tree that’s home to magical eccentrics, among them the elfen Silky, played by Nicola Coughlan, and the blustery Moonface, played by Nonso Anozie.