The Amazing Spider-Man: Director Marc Webb on Andrew Garfield's "Committed" Portrayal of Spider-Man
Posted 06.22.12 by BrentJS
Welsh actor Rhys Ifans recently revealed that his performance of Dr. Curt Connors, aka the Lizard, in The Amazing Spider-Man, owes far more to his observations of drug addicts than to actual lizards. However, it appears that title star Andrew Garfield took a different, more method-ical, approach to portraying young man-turned-spider man Peter Paker. In a recent interview with Yahoo!, director Marc Webb praised Garfield's commitment to the "physical dimension" of the popular superhero, and said that he often felt like the 28-year-old actor was "being taken over by a spider."
[Andrew] was so committed to the physical dimension of the character, like he really was focused on feeling like a spider was taking over him and keeping that DNA alive and every time I would see him, his elbow would be moving a certain way and he was embodying the, like he really was, it felt like he was being taken over by a spider — and when he got in the suit it really paid a lot of dividends.
Though it sounds as if Garfield used the techniques of "method" acting to get into Spider-Man's skin, Garfield said that he was simply determined to serve the character with his portrayal.
I don't know what that word means, but I definitely was dedicated to it and wanted to make sure that we did our job as well as possible and made sure that the character is served in the way that it should be.
Written by James Vanderbilt and Alvin Sargent, The Amazing Spider-Man takes Peter Parker (Garfield) back to high school and explores the mystery of his parents' (Campbell Scott and Embeth Davidtz) death and how they may be responsible for his eventual transformation into Spider-Man. The cast includes Emma Stone, Annie Parisse, Irrfan Khan, Denis Leary, C. Thomas Howell, Chris Zylka, Martin Sheen, and Sally Field.