Andrew Garfield’s Heart Keeps Cracking

Andrew Garfield is currently promoting We Live in Time which opens in limited release this week and wide next week. The film’s world premiere happened last month here in Toronto at TIFF (you can read Sarah’s review here), it’s about a couple, played by Andrew and Florence Pugh, loving each other as hard as they can before she dies of cancer. These are two of the finest actors of their generation, beloved by internet culture, here to make you cry your eyes out. So get ready for the memes and a social media takeover once more and more people see the movie. 

But if you want a head start on the crying, you can follow Andrew on this press tour. Because this is deeply personal for him and, sure, even though he’s promoting a movie, he’s doing it by being fully himself, totally vulnerable, and not running from his pain. 

Andrew lost his mother a few years ago. You might remember, when he was on tour for Tick, Tick…Boom!, he did an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, with his father and brother in the audience, and spoke movingly about losing her, about grief, about what it means to him. Andrew described grief as “unexpressed love” and that he hoped it would stay with him because love doesn’t end, and if grief is a testament to that love, that it should remain too. 

That grief was evident during Andrew’s recent appearance on the NYT’s Modern Love podcast and if you haven’t listened to it, I highly recommend, although please know that you probably won’t be able to get through it without sobbing. I listened on my morning commute today, and I ended up crying the entire time, from the train to my walk to work. Andrew gets emotional while reading a poem by Chris Huntington, “Learning to Measure Time in Love and Loss” and it’s so f-cking beautiful the way he embraces his pain, how welcoming he is of it, because as he says, “the only gateway to true vitality is through a broken heart, acknowledging that our hearts are meant to break and break and break and live by breaking”. His point, paraphrasing an idea he’d heard somewhere else, is that when your heart breaks, it gets bigger. “The only way our hearts can expand is by cracking open.” This is what makes us real, makes us human, gives us even more capacity to love, to live, and, inevitably, to lose. 

You can watch that clip here. And this is the other one that many people are sharing, as he breaks down while he’s reading and reflects on how art can “get us to places we can’t get ourselves”. When he’s pressed on what it is about the poem that inspired this reaction, he talks on the preciousness of time, that there’s never enough of it, and that in this film, all these two people are doing is trying to live, together, this is all they ask. And this is what we all want, quite simply – and sometimes we don’t realise it at the time, unfortunately, that the time is there for us to be with those who are the most dear to us. 

So that’s how I started my day, no regrets. And I am a mess. But in a good way. This is Andrew’s point – there will be nothing more real in my day than this long ass cry that I’ve just had this morning about living and loving in time. 

@nytimes

"I'm sad at the transience of certain relationships in my life. I'm sad at losing my mother." The actor Andrew Garfield talked about love, loss and grief on "Modern Love." The result was a conversation unlike any other in the history of the show. Tap the link in bio to listen. #AndrewGarfield #loss #grief

♬ original sound - The New York Times

 

Join us at The Squawk today for a good cry. (App link here)