With Spider-Man: No Way Home, Andrew Garfield was offered a second chance at redemption, which he seized with both hands. The actor was abruptly fired from the Spider-Man franchise after appearing as the well-known Marvel character in two movies, The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Shortly after, Tom Holland was hired in his stead, and in 2016's Captain America: Civil War, he made his debut as the new Spider-Man.
However, it appeared for a while that Garfield would play the role for a while. A third and fourth movie was originally planned, but after The Amazing Spider-Man 2's box office failure and leaked details regarding the studio's discontent with Garfield's behaviour on one particular occasion, it was decided to reset the series.
At a sumptuous gala in Brazil where the release date for the third Amazing Spider-Man movie was to be announced, Garfield neglected to appear, leaving studio representatives furious, it was disclosed during the infamous Sony breach of 2014. According to reports, Garfield abruptly cancelled the performance, much to the chagrin of studio management. “Here we are about one hour away from our gala event and Andrew decides he doesn’t want to attend. He has a rather scruffy beard and he just wants to be left alone,” a part of the email chain between Sony reps, Garfield’s reps, and Sony chief Amy Pascal read.
In a 2016 interview with The Guardian, Garfield was asked point-blank if he was fired from the role after self-sabotaging his reputation with the studio. He said, “No, I don’t think so. What I’ll proudly say is that I didn’t compromise who I was, I was only ever myself. And that might have been difficult for some people.”
Discussing the recasting in more detail, he told the Daily Beast in 2014, “I think what happened was, through the pre-production, production, and post-production, when you have something that works as a whole, and then you start removing portions of it – because there was even more of it than was in the final cut, and everything was related. Once you start removing things and saying, ‘No, that doesn’t work,’ then the thread is broken, and it’s hard to go with the flow of the story.”
In one of Variety’s Actors on Actors sessions, he admitted that he was heartbroken by the experience. He told Amy Adams, “I signed up to serve the story and serve this incredible character that I’ve been dressing as since I was three, and then it gets compromised and it breaks your heart. I got heartbroken a little bit.”
But the actor appears to have softened his stance about the whole situation after being called back for No Way Home. Looking back on his time as the character, Garfield told Variety, “It was only beautiful. I got to meet Emma [Stone] and work with her and Sally Field. I had karma with Amy Pascal, who was a mother figure, and we would fight, but ultimately, we loved each other on a deep level. We tried to meet as much in the middle as we could in terms of why I wanted to do this role, and what her needs were as the head of the studio.”
Here's what Black Adam star Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock thinks about DC vs. Marvel movie crossover
FBI to reopen investigation into Brad Pitt's alleged assault on Angelina Jolie...