Andrew Garfield on Life After Losing His Mother: 'I'm Still Asking...What Now?'
Over the weekend, the highly-anticipated romdram, We Live in Time, made its American premiere in an elementary school auditorium at the Hamptons International Film Festival (HIFF). The film is the latest in a stacked A24 slate this year that also includes the Nicole Kidman-helmed erotic thriller, Babygirl, and Luca Guadagnino's experimental odyssey, Queer.
In April 2023, when We Live in Time was announced—complete with paparazzi photos of its co-leads, Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh—it was scant of details save for the promise that it was a “funny, deeply moving, and immersive love story.” At the time, I had no other option than to theorize that Garfield would portray some sort of recently heartbroken, reticent academic type while Pugh would play, as I wrote, a "heart-on-the-sleeve-and-skirt-and-shoes free spirit with a penchant for pots boiling over—in and out of the kitchen." After seeing the film this weekend, I can confirm I wasn't far off.
Garfield plays Tobias, a recently divorced Weetabix salesman whose life is just as whole grain as the British breakfast cereal, in that it's mostly just a daily series of mundanities. That is until he meets Pugh's Almut, an ambitious chef with a genuine passion for living. Suddenly, all of life's mundanities have deep meaning. They fall in love, then—as predicted—Almut receives a diagnosis that alters the course of their lives.
I previously wrote that, in the film, they'd surely "teach each other something about life or love, and a captive audience will hope like hell neither one has to die to do it." Again, I was—quite unfortunately—very right. Ultimately, We Live in Time plays like a poignant—at times, punishing—reel of an actual couple's time together. The lesson? A happy ending is never guaranteed—no matter how deserving the people.
"I was in a very reflective, kind of grief-stricken place and I needed to consider, 'what now?'" Garfield further explained. "I'm still asking that, 'what now?' Life started to take on a completely different texture and color after my mother’s death, and rightly so. In a very natural way, I just felt very initiated into a deeper reality where there’s an awareness that we’re all going toward the same ultimate destination...and we better remember that because that’s what gives life meaning."
Of course, the media cycle surrounding the film has focused largely on this horse, or the fact that Garfield and Pugh are so adept at acting that they didn't hear cut while filming one of the script's sex scenes.
“The scene becomes passionate—as we choreographed it—and we get into it, as it were,” Garfield recalled in a recent interview. “And we go a little bit further than we were meant to just because we don't hear 'cut' and it's feeling safe, and we’re kind of like, ‘Okay let’s go to the next thing and the next thing and we’ll let this progress.’ ”