Andrew Garfield has shared that he would be willing to return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Spider Man but with a specific condition – it must be “very weird”.
After his turn playing the eponymous superhero in 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man and 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Garfield reprised his role in Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021, alongside Tobey Maguire and Tom Holland’s versions of the character.
With the introduction of the multiverse now allowing different actors who have previously played the same character to interact and share the screen, fans have been clamouring to see Garfield return to the MCU.
The Social Network star, however, has stayed coy on whether he will be making an appearance in the forthcoming Spider-Man instalment with Tom Holland, but has revealed what he needs of the story to make a proper comeback.
At a recent appearance at the Middle East Film & Comic Con in Abu Dhabi, Garfield was asked if he would return as his rendition of the web-slinging superhero.
“I really love playing Spider-Man. I would love to play the character again in some capacity, but I think it would have to be very weird,” he said.
“I think I would want to do something very strange. I would want to do something very unique, and offbeat, and surprising, kind of like the creative freedom that they have with the animated Spider-Verse movies. I think they’re so great and you can honour the character in so many different ways through the multiverse.”
Earlier this year in January, Garfield denied he would be returning again in the fourth instalment of the Spider-Man films starring Holland.
“I’m gonna disappoint you,” he told GQ magazine. “Yeah, no. But I know no one’s gonna to trust anything I say from now on.”
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“If it felt in line with my soul and was gonna be fun. Maybe I’m gonna have like five kids at some point, and I’m gonna need to start saving up for the school tuition or something,” he joked.
However, fans remain suspicious as he also denied he would be in Spider-Man: No Way Home in the years before its release.
In an interview last year, Garfield spoke about being “left dangling” after The Amazing Spider-Man 3 was dumped following mixed reviews and a middling run at the box office, but did add that he would “100 per cent come back if it was the right thing, if it’s additive to the culture, if there’s a great concept or something that hasn’t been done before that’s unique and odd and exciting and that you can sink your teeth into”.
“I love that character, and it brings joy. If part of what I bring is joy, then I’m joyful in return,” he told Esquire.
In an Actors-on-Actors interview with Zendaya in 2022, Garfield said his Spider-Man experience left him “heartbroken”.
“When I did my first Spider-Man film, I was your age – 25, 26. And I wasn’t ready, man. I was like, ‘I need to back off, because I don’t know who I am yet. And my prefrontal cortex is still forming,’” he told her.
Garfield has previously suggested that he was too young when he was cast as Spider-Man, saying in 2016: “There’s something about being that young in that kind of machinery that I think is really dangerous. I was still young enough to struggle with the value system, I suppose, of corporate America… I found that really, really tricky.”
“I signed up to serve the story and to 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.”
