We Live In Time: Andrew Garfield says film with Florence Pugh full of love, longing and ‘gallows humour’

In the words of the great poet Huey Lewis, the power of love is a curious thing. It’s strong and it’s sudden and it can be cruel sometimes, but it might just save your life. Anyone who has experienced the roller-coaster that is falling deeply in love will also attest to its ability to manipulate time, making a moment feel like it’s stretching forever. Conversely, weeks and months can fly by in a whirlwind when one falls head over heels, and an eventual ending can make years feel all too brief. Two of the UK’s brightest talents, Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, explore this phenomenon as a young couple in We Live In Time, the latest film from Irish director John Crowley. Crowley, FYI, previously gave us the 2015 drama Brooklyn, which earned an Academy award nomination for best picture. The movie is centred on the relationship between Pugh’s Almut, a brilliant young chef, and Garfield’s Tobias, an unassuming sales representative of a breakfast cereal company. But instead of offering the standard linear timeline of a blossoming love affair, screenwriter Nick Payne, an acclaimed London playwright, has opted for something very different — jumping forwards and backwards to land on pivotal moments. The idea here is that the totality of any relationship is measured in such moments, so let’s not get bogged down in all the dross in between. It focuses on the big-ticket emotional items, which in this instance include Almut’s terminal cancer diagnosis and the impact it has on her career, her relationship with Tobias and the child they share. A word of advice: bring tissues. But don’t for a second think We Live In Time is only a weep-fest. “I love that it’s funny,” Garfield tells STM. “I love that it’s gallows humour. I love that it’s romantic. I love that it’s full of longing and love. “It’s about life, and life is, hopefully, full of loss and love and gain and beauty and adventure and difficulty and pain and confusion and vulnerability and success and failure. “The film feels like it contains a whole lifetime in two hours.” And it does, courtesy of Payne’s non-linear plot, which sees the tragic diagnosis land early, before drip-feeding key moments throughout the relationship that are designed to pile on emotional weight. But it also has to be one of the hardest ways to tell what is otherwise a fairly conventional story. “Yeah, it poses difficulty for the filmmakers to make sense of it; to make sure that everything adds up emotionally,” Garfield admits. “But I find that jigsaw puzzle quite touching, quite poetic, and a little kind of elevating, in terms of the style and the feeling of the film. “I feel very supportive of that element of the film, and as a performer, as an actor, it doesn’t really change anything because we film everything out of sequence anyway.” After coming to the world’s attention playing Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin in David Fincher’s hit 2010 drama, The Social Network, Garfield’s career has had many twists and turns. The 41-year-old has earned two Oscar nominations for best actor, in both cases for portraying real-life people; firstly in the war drama Hacksaw Ridge and then for an incredibly impressive turn as composer Jonathan Larson in the 2021 biographical musical Tick, Tick . . . Boom! The two roles could not be more different, which speaks to the diversity of projects the actor takes on. Then, of course, there have been three appearances in spandex as the friendly, neighbourhood superhero Spider-Man – The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) and most recently a cracking cameo opposite Tom Holland in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021). For his work on the stage, Garfield has a Tony award on the mantlepiece, and, though he has largely focused on the silver screen, his performance in the true-crime TV series Under The Banner Of Heaven was recognised with an Emmy nomination. In talking about any of those successes, Garfield is quick to credit his co-stars and creative team, and the conversation about We Live In Time is no different. “It’s a joy and a gift and a privilege to work with Florence,” he gushes. “She’s one of those rare people and rare actors that not only is looking for the joy and the fun and the laughter, but is also looking for, ‘How do we make this as deep and real and connected as possible?’ “We both thrive as people, as actors, on connectivity; we love working with other people, we love collaborating. We’re not solitary, isolated creatives; we’re pack animals. “So that felt very fortunate and pleasurable that we got to rely on each other and inspire each other into whatever scene we were shooting.” Given many of said scenes in We Live In Time required heavy, emotional performances, Garfield was grateful to have Pugh as his partner — in one sequence, he shaved his co-star’s head. “The best thing is if you have another actor who is as committed, devoted and present as you want to be in a scene, and I was so fortunate to have that with Florence,” he says. “That is just a cheat code.” And the two had something else in common, having both featured in mega-budget comic book movies. Pugh, whose star has been steadily on the rise for years now, burst into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2021 as the assassin Yelena Belova, estranged sister of Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff in the blockbuster Black Widow. She’s set to reprise the role this year in Marvel’s hotly anticipated Thunderbolts. However, Garfield says they didn’t spend much time swapping superhero war stories. “We didn’t really talk much about that,” he admits. “We would speak more about the perils of being known people, or being recognisable people, and we would bond over stories around that and the hilarious, silly and difficult things about that.” Before launching into an example, the actor prefaces it with an apologetic acknowledgement that this is the sort of conversation one can only have with another uber-famous person, lest one comes across as a bit of a twat. “Otherwise, people are like, ‘Oh, yeah, it must be so hard (to be a famous actor)‘, but the loss of anonymity is a real thing,” Garfield says with a laugh. “Especially if you’re having a bad hair day, and you just want to go and get a coffee, and you have someone videoing you . . . but, again, it’s the smallest of small things to complain about, and it feels silly even mentioning it to you right now.” Garfield also felt a bit silly once during the production, when a decision to eat a late-night curry before shooting a carousel scene almost backfired spectacularly. “I was like, ‘I really f..... this up’, because I was deeply, deeply nauseous all the way through,” the actor reveals. “And Florence was delighting in torturing me and twisting my chair, and then being very sweet and caring. But I did not vomit, which is some kind of achievement.” Luckily, one suspects even more impressive achievements are coming Garfield’s way in years to come. We Live In Time is in cinemas now.