thinker

Andrew Garfield has big ideas about life and death-even a theory about the nature of time. Over an afternoon at one of his favorite New York City haunts, the actor let us into his world.

- RACHEL DODES

ANDREW GARFIELD HAD A DECISION TO MAKE. HE WAS TWENTY-SEVEN and had gained international recognition for his supporting role in The Social Network. He was working on The Amazing Spider-Man and had just been offered another blockbuster film. Its director said he’d be crazy not to take it. But Garfield wasn’t so sure. He was considering another role, one that could change everything for him—if not in that particularly L.A. way that only Marvel can. Director Mike Nichols wanted him to play Biff Loman, Willy Loman’s son, in Death of a Salesman on Broadway. But Nichols didn’t pressure him. If Garfield decided this is what he wanted to do, then this is what he wanted to do. Instead, they just talked. Garfield asked why Nichols had ended up in New York and not L.A. “He was like, ‘Why would I ever want to live in a place where I can tell how my stock is doing according to how the valet-parking attendant is looking at me on a day-to-day basis?’ ” Garfield recalls, doing a pretty good soothing, lilting Mike Nichols. “I was like, ‘Wow. I want to go where you’re going.’ ”

He did the play.

It’s tempting to see this as the most pivotal decision of Garfield’s career, especially since we know, in hindsight, how beautifully it all worked out. It’s tempting to see all of life this way, really—as a series of forking happenstances, one after another, none of which could have been without the one preceding it. That’s how life works in movies, after all. Beginning, middle, end. But life as we actually live it is more like a collection of small, disparate events that become meaningful only with the passage of time. That’s how Andrew Garfield sees it, anyway.