Andrew Garfield was meant to play Spider-Man. After all, it was his first costume as a three-year old kid. Growing up all the angst and inner conflict of Peter Parker is still very much a part of Garfield‘s present day life. We learned this during our very exclusive interview with the man himself. In The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Garfield reprises the title role following his critically acclaimed performance in Marc Webb’s original, The Amazing Spider-Man.

Garfield is a BAFTA-winner, a 2011 Golden Globe nominee for his work in The Social Network, and was a Tony Award nominee for his role in the revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, in 2012. Other screen credits include Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go, Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus; Spike Jonze’s robot love story I’m Here; Robert Redford’s Lions For Lambs; Revolution Films’ Red Riding Trilogy – 1974, directed by Julian Jarrold; and John Crowley’s Boy A, for which he earned the Best Actor BAFTA in 2008.

H: What does Spider-Man mean to you?
AG: I know how important it is to be a fan. I know what Spider-Man can do for kids – and for people who aren’t kids anymore. For anyone who encounters the character, who has an affinity for him, it’s so reassuring when it’s done right.  No matter what problems you have in your life, Spider-Man is there as evidence that you can get through it – because Peter Parker has all the problems of a kid, and he’s getting through it, too.  He’s reaching out his hand to tell you it’ll be okay.

H: Did you have reservations about taking on this role when it was presented to you?
AG: Of course. I have reservations about getting out of bed every morning! Because what the hell is going on, what is this weird rock we’re living on, floating through the universe. It’s scary, its scary out there.

H: You just got deep (laughs).
AG: I’ve been deep (laughs). Then of course you go, ‘I may as well do something,’ so we may as well tell a Spider-Man story (laughs).
We get lucky in the sense that we have the opportunity to be a part of story telling. I love being able to be an actor. I love being able to tell a story, and this is where it gets tricky for me because I’ve been a Spider-Man fan since I was three. It was my very first Halloween costume and since then it grew to be a real friendship I have with the character. So in getting the offer to even screen test was a very overwhelming moment because I thought, suddenly a thousand different voices rise up inside me, luckily the most overpowering one was my inner three-year old jumping up and screaming, Yes!
But then there are all these other voices internally going ‘How dare you even think something so tremendous and big?” and “you’re going to mess it up,’ and ‘everyone is going to hate you,’ and then the three-year old is going, ‘but I want to play Spider-Man,’ and ‘why can’t I do it,?’ ‘they may want me to do it. (laughs).

H: Sounds like you were made for this role.
AG: That may be no accident that I’m playing this extremely existential character. There is no accident that I’m a weirdly neurotic, existential, terrified person and you probably witness that and thought Peter Parker would be an appropriate character.
Ultimately you have to get out of bed and give yourself to something greater than yourself, and for me right now it’s Spider-Man.

H: What’s a major difference from the first film?
AG: Peter Parker trips over his own two feet, but Spider-Man can trip anybody up.  He’s a trickster. One of the defining characteristics of the trickster is they turn their enemies’ weaknesses against themselves – rather than throwing punches and kicks, they are making their opponents beat themselves.

H: What can you tell us about the relationship between Peter and Gwen?
AG: Peter and Gwen are giving it a go. For better or worse, Peter has an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.  It’s hard for him to live with himself by breaking that promise, but impossible for him to live without her. He’s dealing with the guilt of a broken promise, but there’s also a destiny between them that they can’t deny. He’s a torn, confused young man trying to figure out the best thing to do.

H: Speaking of which, Peter Parker goes through quite an emotional rollercoaster ride in this film, why does he have such a hard time?
AG: If it was too easy we wouldn’t want to watch him because the wonderful thing about Peter is that he is all of us. He goes through all the emotional troubles we all go through, he just goes through them in a couple of hours as opposed to a couple of years. And that’s compelling because we’re seeing our own lives, our own small difficulties and large difficulties played out on screen all the while we have a responsibility to the gifts we’ve been given whatever Spider-Man gifts are. Whether that’s journalism or acting or jewelry making or tablecloth setting (laughs) or whatever that is. And that’s an amazing thing to be able to play all these obstacles. The ridiculousness of this happened and then that happens and then that happens; that can’t happen all in the course of one movie but it does for Peter and that’s why it’s so compelling. We feel for him so much.

H: How did you physically prepare for the role?
AG: I don’t have an interesting answer to that. I had to go to the gym a lot and I had to create the superhero aesthetic on the outside of the body and also on the inside. I needed to feel as flexible and as open as possible. The boring answer is I went to the gym, the more interesting answer is I studied Bugs Bunny, and Charlie Chaplin and Muhammad Ali and Usain Bolt. I also worked with a great dance choreographer, two of them actually. They would come over to my apartment that I was renting and we would just do ridiculous contemporary dance and make sure that all of my extremities were kind of long and wide as possible. Because you know what the potentiality of a spider’s movement is. It can be here, and then it can be there in a split second. And the lightness and the stillness it can achieve is balletic and kind of beautiful to witness. I hope it’s not just like a guy in a suit beating people up. It has to be a Bruce Lee, Muhammad Ali, a spider, a contemporary dancer, Buster Keaton hybrid.

H: You see that when Peter and Gwen are trying to escape in an elevator, how was it to film that particular scene?
AG: That was fun and so scary. I enjoyed that a lot.

H: How many takes to get it?
AH:  Many takes. We did 14 takes, and used take 9.

H: So how did you develop that fluidity on screen?
AG: There was a very cool guy named Cal McCrystal was our ‘Clown Deviser’ – our name for a physical comedy consultant. He is a very physical comedian, creator, director. We went through the entire script with him and he would say, ‘Well, you could do something here, and you could do something here,’ and we would kind of devise it. We managed to shoot some of them and others we didn’t but that was a fun part of the process, to give that joyous comedy feel to the film.
Go back and watch Charlie Chaplin’s globe dance from The Great Dictator, you’ll weep and you’ll be agape. It’s just like wow, its so genius. It’s a real lost art right now.

H: Why is the pursuit of justice so important for Peter Parker? 
AG: He has an overdeveloped sense of responsibility and heroic impulse, but he has this deeply felt sense of justice. That’s not something you can learn – you’re born that way.

H: What can audiences learn from Spider-Man?
AG: I kind of want them to take away what they take away. You don’t want to dictate to them what we’re trying to give them and we’re not even aware of what we’re trying to give. But one of the things I’m taking away from playing him and the experience of being deep into playing this character is that he feels  like a metaphor for my life, and for all of our lives in the sense that we are all Peter evidently. In terms of the ordinary struggles we have to go through, the ordinariness of imperfection, failure, the stumbling and fumbling through life, the mystery of it all.
We are all Spider-Man in the sense that we have something to offer. We have something wonderful and extraordinary to give. I think our only real duty is to ourselves in the sense that we need to discover what our spider powers are. Whether it is tablecloth setting, or bricklaying or art or business or science, or whatever it is. Then you give that gift as freely as you can, as you’re struggling with being a regular human being.