Andrew Garfield has done a lot since starring in 2012's The Amazing Spider-Man and its 2014 sequel, but given the magnitude of the role, it's unsurprising that interviewers still universally ask him about it.
With roles in two of 2021's major awards players—Michael Showalter's The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and Lin-Manuel Miranda's big-screen directorial debut, Tick, Tick... Boom!—he has once again been doing the rounds. And, in an interview with The Guardian, Garfield described his time as the spandex-adorned web-slinger as a "big awakening" which "hurt". In his words:
“I went from being a naive boy to growing up. [...] How could I ever imagine that it was going to be a pure experience? [...] There are millions of dollars at stake and that’s what guides the ship. It was a big awakening and it hurt."
Garfield continued, “Comic-Con in San Diego is full of grown men and women still in touch with that pure thing the character meant to them. [But] you add in market forces and test groups and suddenly the focus is less on the soul of it and more on ensuring we make as much money as possible. And I found that–find that–heartbreaking in all matters of the culture. Money is the thing that has corrupted all of us and led to the terrible ecological collapse that we are all about to die under.”
It's not the first time that Garfield has spoken about his disillusionment with Hollywood after Spider-Man. In a 2016 interview with Amy Adams, as part of Variety's "Actors on Actors" interview series, he said, "there's something about being that young in that kind of machinery which I think is really dangerous [...] I was still young enough to struggle with the value system, I suppose, of corporate America really, it's a corporate enterprise mostly."