Andrew Garfield opens up about Amazing Spider-Man struggles that left him ‘heartbroken’

Andrew Garfield has explained why he thinks he struggled so much with the Amazing Spider-Man films.

The actor, who previously said the experience left him “heartbroken”, addressed his time as the web-slinging superhero during a new interview with Zendaya.

Speaking during Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series, Garfield said: “I think both you and I have gotten to a very privileged position where we get to decide, and we get to have agency and choose. And I find it important for myself to go, ‘What am I called to?’”

He continued: “For someone like you, who got attention very young and it’s persisted, this is a really interesting thing, because obviously everyone is famous in their lives right now through social media.

“But where you live is very specific: you have to deal with a lot of people’s projections. You have to deal with a lot of people having an idea of who you are without actually knowing who you are.”

Garfield, 38, then suggested that he was too young to be cast as Spider-Man, telling Zendaya: “When I did my first Spider-Man film, I was your age – 25, 26. And I wasn’t ready, man. I was like, ‘I need to back off, because I don’t know who I am yet. And my prefrontal cortex is still forming.’”

The British actor played the character in the 2012 and 2014 films. In 2021, he returned for a small but pivotal role in Spider-Man: No Way Home, which he co-starred in alongside Tom Holland and Zendaya.

Andrew Garfield opened up about his struggles after being cast as Spider-Man (Getty Images)

Speaking about his Amazing Spider-Man experiences in 2016, Garfield said: “There’s something about being that young in that kind of machinery that I think is really dangerous. I was still young enough to struggle with the value system, I suppose, of corporate America… I found that really, really tricky.”

Elaborating, he continued; “I signed up to serve the story and to serve this incredible character that I’ve been dressing as since I was three, and then it gets compromised and it breaks your heart. I got heartbroken a little bit.”