From the grocery store to a $1.9 billion movie - how Andrew Garfield conquered Hollywood

Andrew Garfield. Photo / File

It was the proudest gig to date of Andrew Garfield's career: standing on top of a bin in central Madrid while playing air guitar with a tortilla chip. He was 21, and had only appeared in a handful of small plays since leaving drama school. But then his ship came in – a part in a Doritos advert, which was about to shoot in Spain, and paid £2500 ($4772) for two days' work.

Back then, Garfield was renting a room in "a mouse-infested flat" in northwest London, and making ends meet behind the Starbucks counter in a nearby branch of Sainsbury's. "Then suddenly someone wanted to pay me lots of money to go to this glamorous place abroad and brandish a crisp," he recalls, over tea in a West End hotel.

Seventeen years on, it's easy to see it as the first step on a path that would lead to two Academy Award nominations and the (shared) title role in the sixth highest-grossing film ever made, but at the time it felt "like a way to keep doing plays while covering the rent". That's largely what Garfield spent the £2500 on: the rest went on a new bicycle and a meal with friends.

Sometimes humble beginnings are all you get. In Tick, Tick… Boom!, his recent film for Netflix, Garfield plays Jonathan Larson, the writer and composer who became famous in the mid-1990s for his boundary-ripping musical Rent. Larson had laboured on the show in obscurity, and didn't live to see the acclaim that was lavished upon it: on the day of its first off-Broadway preview he died of an aortic aneurysm at the unthinkably young age of 35.

Tick, Tick… Boom! is itself a musical, fleshed out from Larson's own autobiographical one-man-and-a-piano show of the same name, and follows its subject through the lean years when Rent began to percolate. Directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, it's a great new entry in the struggling-artist canon, and Garfield is outstanding in it: by turns inspirational and exasperating, and ablaze with shock-haired charisma. His performance earned him a second nomination for a Best Actor Oscar at next weekend's Academy Awards, five years after his last, for Hacksaw Ridge.

Tick, Tick…Boom! was the first film Garfield shot after the death of his mother Lynn from pancreatic cancer in 2019. Making it became part of the grieving process: filming a scene in which Jonathan draws encouragement from an answer phone message left by his idol Stephen Sondheim, for instance, Garfield imagined the tender words in his mother's voice instead.

Andrew Garfield and Alexandra Shipp in Tick Tick Boom, streaming on Netflix. Photo / Netflix

"She was the embodiment of unconditional love," he says. "Of course she was proud of the career achievements I was proud of. But if I'd grown up to be a murderer, she would have shown up at the prison with chocolate chip cookies every week."

What's more, says Garfield, "she honestly didn't care" about awards – so, presumably, would have been less exercised than many over Bafta's perplexing decision not to shortlist her son. Along with Olivia Colman, he's one of two notable Brits to be nominated by the American Academy, but not its UK counterpart. Did he feel snubbed?

He starts laughing, then shifts into diplomacy mode. "Honestly, how people vote is none of my business," he says. Then, after a pause, "I think they acknowledged some great people." Another pause, and a twinkle. "But do I think Olivia Colman gave one of the best performances of the year? Yes I do."

It was the US that gave Garfield his big screen break. When he was 22, and appearing at the National Theatre alongside the equally unknown Andrea Riseborough and Matt Smith, he was asked by Billy Elliot director Stephen Daldry to try out for an adaptation of Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. That came to naught, but he caught the eye of a casting director, who suggested him for Robert Redford's ethics-of-war drama Lions for Lambs.

"The character was an all-American frat boy, so I thought I had no chance. But then a few months later I was being flown out to Burbank and was fourth on the call sheet after Redford, Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep." When he was offered the lead in the Channel 4 drama Boy A later the same year, he "wondered if it was a step back. I was like, 'Should I just wait for the next big thing?'" In the end, it was a question from his British agent – how would he feel watching someone else play the part in Boy A? – that convinced him to take it.

Andrew Garfield stars as Peter Parker/Spider-Man in Columbia Pictures 'The Amazing Spider-man'. Photo / Supplied

It was the right choice. The earnest Hollywood liberal hectoring of Lions for Lambs quickly faded from view – but the soul-scouring Boy A (about a youth re-entering society after serving 14 years in a juvenile prison) was a sensation that made Garfield's name, and won him a television Bafta at 24. He credits his Boy A co-star Peter Mullan with teaching him how to act for the camera. "It was like watching Marlon Brando," he says. "He had this power, but it was a gentle power. It was almost sexually attractive."

After that, for a spell in the 2000s, Garfield was one of a gaggle of UK-reared upmarket heart-throbs working the Hollywood audition circuit. He'd often find himself scrambling for the same roles as Robert Pattinson, Eddie Redmayne, Jamie Dornan and Tom Sturridge, though the band saw each other as allies rather than rivals. Their collective social life, he says, "was proper Brits-abroad stuff. We'd wake up every morning and it would be 'Where are we having breakfast?' 'When are we going to go to the beach?' 'When do you want to play ping-pong?' We'd go to the Standard Hotel on Sunset Boulevard and order a single cocktail between us so that we could just sit there and swim in the pool."

Failures begat mythic anecdotes, such as Sturridge's attempt to snag a part in 300, Zack Snyder's beefy Spartan action epic. "Tom tried to bulk up by wearing eight layers on his top half," Garfield recalls, grinning. "But during the audition they asked him to take off his shirt, so he had to spend four minutes removing all of these clothes in front of the casting people. It was the most brutal striptease ever."

A high-profile supporting role in The Social Network in 2010 paved the way for a further career breakthrough on stage – and with it, another masterclass from an older co-star. In 2012, Garfield was cast as Biff Loman in Mike Nichols's Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: the actor playing his father, Willy Loman, was Philip Seymour Hoffman, in what would be his final stage appearance before his death by heroin at 46.

"It's still really hard to talk about Phil," says Garfield, "because on that play we were living out the archetypal father-son relationship together every night." His fondest memories are of Hoffman approaching him "at the end of the nights when I felt like I hadn't done enough, or it had just been a complete s*** show. And every time I thought that, he would come over and say, 'You had a great show tonight.' And I'd say I didn't feel like I'd been on top of my game, and he'd reply, 'Yeah, you weren't. You weren't doing it. It was doing you'."

More sound advice came his way from Heath Ledger, on the set of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus – the film the 28-year-old Australian actor was making when he died of an accidental overdose in 2008. "It was just after Heath had played the Joker in The Dark Knight, and he was like, 'I've realised I've got to do one film for them and three for me. That's the magic ratio.'"

Andrew Garfield stars in Martin Scorsese's film Silence. Photo / Kerry Brown

A few years later, Garfield took the role of Peter Parker in the 2012 Spider-Man reboot: a project he hoped could be both for him and the Hollywood machine, a view he now acknowledges was a shade optimistic. "I love that character," he says. "And taking the role honestly wasn't just a money gig. But I came to accept that playing it meant having one foot planted in the more mercenary side of the business, no matter how much I personally bumped against the values of it."

Did he have any misgivings about returning in the recent Spider-Man: No Way Home, which united the Garfield, Tobey Maguire and Tom Holland versions of the character on the pretence of a kink in the multiverse? "Being a 38-year-old in spandex was the main fear," he grimaces. "So yes, I was dealing with that." How did he feel about the unsuccessful campaign to get the Marvel blockbuster nominated for Best Picture, pushing back against the Oscars' perceived stuffiness?

"I don't know," he frowns. "I mean, it's the sixth biggest movie in the history of movies. Making a film that a gajillion people want to see together is a miracle. Making a film that an awarding body loves is also a miracle. Sometimes those miracles overlap, and sometimes they don't. But I personally feel pretty satisfied with the audience response. I think that's plenty."

It was in 2016, once Holland had assumed the red and blue leotard, that Garfield discovered a very specific aptitude. In two otherwise janglingly dissimilar films, Martin Scorsese's Silence and Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge, he brilliantly played devout men whose beliefs are tested in extremis: respectively, during a 17th-century Catholic mission to Japan, then on the World War II battlefields of Okinawa.

His terrific turn as a self-absorbed conspiracy theorist in the Los Angeles-set neo-noir Under the Silver Lake also fit the template, as does his forthcoming TV series Under the Banner of Heaven, in which he plays a Mormon detective investigating a double murder within the church. But it was the National Theatre's 2017 revival of Angels in America, in which he played Prior Walter, a prophetic gay Aids patient, that made it look more like a calling. Garfield is Jewish on his American father's side, and calls himself a "spiritual seeker" – he loves playing this stuff. He regards James Stewart as the master of the crisis-of-faith film, and It's a Wonderful Life as the "ultimate version".

Garfield's love-life – he dated Spider-Man co-star Emma Stone for four years, and he has recently been seeing American model and singer Alyssa Miller – was public enough for his casting in Angels in America to prompt an early version of a very current argument: should straight actors play gay roles?

"I think it's two different conversations getting conflated," he says. "One is about equality of opportunity, and I'm completely in on that. Because we should want a world in which no matter your sexual orientation, your colour or your heritage, everyone gets a fair whack. But the other is about empathic imagination, and if we only allow people to be cast as exactly who they are, it'll be the death of it. So the two separate conversations have to happen simultaneously. Because I'm not willing to support the death of empathic imagination. It's what we need most as a culture, and it's beautiful. It's the only thing that's going to save us right now."

His eyes shine with a zeal you could call messianic.