Andrew Garfield has said he was “living and dying by external validation” earlier on in his career.
The Amazing Spider-Man actor, 41, who stars opposite Florence Pugh in the new romance film We Live In Time, reflected on his mental health and experience of grief following his mother’s death in 2019.
He told British GQ: “I feel quite passionate about this thing that’s just available to us that we’ve been somehow imprisoned from or cordoned off from.
“It’s like, oh, wait a minute, we’re allowed to feel all of this (grief). And actually, we can show up for each other and support each other as men.”
Garfield said he has put time into “keeping the channel open” between him and his feelings over the years.
Looking back, he said: “I was living and dying by external validation.
“When I’m getting nominated for an award, I feel great. When I lose that award, I feel like shit.
“And I was like, this is unsustainable. This is not how I want to live my life.”
“I can’t be so dependent on things that are outside of my control,” he added.
“I want to know there’s something eternal in me, that my worthiness is not dependent on whether or not you like me.”
Garfield and his brother Ben began to examine their childhood and the actor suggested his father Richard shared some of the same problems as them.
He said: “I think it has been a series of revelations for him as well, in terms of his experiences as a child and his parents’ experiences, and we go deeper and deeper and deeper into our epigenetics on his side, this Jewish survival gene.
“We’re people who’ve had to prove our worthiness as human beings over and over and over again. And to the point where we’ve been deemed so worthless in my ancestry.”
Garfield said his father has called him before awards shows to say: “Win or lose, I love you and you’re enough.”
The actor has starred in films including The Social Network (2010) and Hacksaw Ridge (2016) and was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in musical drama Tick, Tick… Boom! in 2022.
Read the full feature online at GQ Hype now.
