While Andrew Garfield promotes his latest film, 99 Homes, people can’t stop asking him about losing the Spiderman role. While he has been gracious about vacating the role, saying that he even pushed for the franchise to rejoin Marvel, the actor gets explicit in an interview with Indiewire about how much pressure the role was. Specifically, how it was hard to please everyone in such a high-profile role:
The pressure to get it right, to please everyone … it’s not going to happen … You end up pleasing no one, or everyone just a little bit. Like, ‘Eh, that was good.’ [The films are] mass-marketed, like ‘We want 50-year-old white men to love it, gay teenagers to love it, bigot homophobes in Middle America to love it, 11-year-old girls to love it.’ That’s canning Coke.
It’s Garfield’s most colorful quote yet on how difficult it was to carry a superhero franchise. Later on, he calls having to deal with those expectations “a bummer,” and a delicate balance between providing an authentic experience and catering to the bottom line: “I understand people want to make a lot of money, and they’re going to spend a lot of money so the playpen can be as big as it was. I can’t live that way; it sounds like a prison, to be honest, living within those expectations.”
Still, Garfield said he wasn’t afraid of taking a similar opportunity in the future (“I’m not going to shy away from something that a lot of people are going to see”). For now, though, it seems like Garfield is happy to get back to films like 99 Homes, which is his first non-Spiderman film since The Social Network, which was released way back in 2010.