Look At These Two!

Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh have just worked together for the first time, but the co-stars of the new A24 tearjerker We Live in Time are eager to do it again. “Honestly, I’ve been thinking about this, because we’ve started out so intimate,” Garfield says, turning to Pugh and locking eyes. “Where do you go from the most intimate?”

That the two Brits were cast as romantic partners in a movie already felt like something of an inevitability: Both are widely admired, Oscar-nominated, internet objects of affection. They are the sort of celebrities whose dating exploits are tracked by DeuxMoi, and they’re also among the most respected thespians of their generation. Of course two actors with this level of heat were going to find themselves in the same project, like two extremely charismatic human magnets drawn together.

“What if we’re partners in crime or partners in solving crime?” asks Garfield, sitting side-by-side with Pugh in a spacious room within Soho’s chic Crosby Street Hotel. Toward the end of a long day of press, a few weeks before We Live in Time’s theatrical release (Oct. 11 in LA and New York, everywhere Oct. 18), they exude a touch of delirious glee, like kids in the back seat on a long family car ride. Garfield is absent-mindedly squeezing a stress ball while Pugh appears contemplative, head resting on her hands.

“It feels like there’s a good buddy cop thing here: We are really, really good at working together, but we are just dysfunctional otherwise,” he continues. “Maybe we are in love with each other, but we can’t own it, and maybe we have to share a room, so” — he gestures to Pugh — “you’ll bring someone home one night, I’ll bring someone home the next night. How do we manage that?”

“So we’re spies?” Pugh counters. “Is it funny?”

Garfield responds quickly: “Naturally.”

“Look at us.” They start giggling at this point, both whispering “look at us” conspiratorially. “Or we’re bank robbers,” Garfield says, smiling broadly. “And we’re just traveling guys that will do weird heists and robberies and trick people.”

“I like that,” Pugh says. “Or adventurers.”

“Yeah, some kind of adventurers. Indiana Jones-y. I’d be, like, your assistant or whatever.”

Pugh now appears deep in thought: “I don’t think we look like each other enough to ever be siblings… Cousins?”

“Step-siblings,” Garfield offers.

At this, Pugh nods her head. “We could be step-siblings.”

We Live in Time is an artful Instagram carousel of a movie, depicting the monumental moments — as well as the quietly, powerfully mundane ones — in the relationship between Almut, an ambitious and focused chef, and Tobias, a sensitive corporate salesman. It skips around chronologically, giving the film an intoxicating (500) Days of Summer-esque quality, and pulls off wild shifts in tone: An early scene in which Almut is diagnosed with cancer is closely followed by the couple’s absurd meet-cute, where Almut hits Tobias with her car; a Top Chef-style cooking competition sequence provides the film’s chair-gripping, heart-pumping climax. Ultimately, it’s a story about choosing the life we want for ourselves and making the most of the time we have — and for its stars, a similar accounting of their own personal lives was unavoidable.

When director John Crowley approached Garfield about playing Tobias, Garfield was on a bit of a sabbatical following his 2022 Best Actor Oscar nomination for the musical biopic Tick, Tick… Boom! “I was taking a break, and I wasn’t looking to make anything,” Garfield tells me, as Pugh gazes on. “I wasn’t not open to it, but I was very content, just smelling the flowers a bit, looking out the window and thinking about life.” Loquacious and brainy — while talking about fans’ relationship to celebrities, he casually expounds on Carl Jung’s “golden shadow” theory — Garfield gives the impression in conversation that thinking about life is a treasured pastime. “I was quite burnt out and tired from work. And there was some satisfaction that I was feeling, which was a new feeling. I was like, ‘What do I do with feeling content?’”

How people respond to my work, my haircut, the shape of my body, something I mis-say in an interview has nothing to do with my inherent value.

Garfield’s mother passed away in 2019 from pancreatic cancer, and Garfield — who has spoken movingly about his own grief — admits he still hasn’t quite determined how to move forth professionally. “I was confused about work, to be honest,” he says of the period before Crowley reached out to him. “I was confused about what it meant anymore since my mum passed, because I felt like half of my drive and half of my ambition died with her. It was a weird experience. So I was just kind of processing all of that. And then I read this script and I thought, ‘This is what I’m kind of going through.’”

He also was excited at the prospect of reuniting with Crowley, whose 2007 film Boy A marked Garfield’s film debut. While it might have been hard to predict then that Garfield would go on to become both a Marvel superhero and an awards-show darling, Crowley says a sense of openness and discovery has always been the heartbeat of Garfield’s work. “With Andrew, there’s a profound emotionality in what he does as an actor, obviously,” Crowley tells me. “And I thought that this would be a very interesting chance for him to display a different kind of leading man, somebody who’s at ease with his emotions, who is not threatened by his partner, his wife, being the sort of star in the family.”

While Pugh wasn’t battling the exact same existential questions as Garfield, she describes being in a similar moment of transition as she started work on We Live in Time. “It’s been a very big year for me, just in personal life and also in work, understanding what I can and can’t do anymore,” she explains. “Personally, [the film] definitely gave me the kick up the ass that I think this movie is for, which was a wonderful thing. I mean, it’s a big thing when you start looking at yourself and looking at your life and going, ‘What don’t I like and how do I change that?’”

Garfield looks back at her, adding: “And it was right on time for you because you’re in your Saturn return.”

Pugh isn’t exaggerating about it being a big year. Since her 2019 breakout with Midsommar and Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, for which she earned an Oscar nomination, Pugh has become an unmissable, shimmering movie star. She had a key role in last year’s Best Picture winner, Oppenheimer, as well as a pivotal turn in the spring blockbuster Dune: Part Two. She has her own Marvel tentpole, Thunderbolts, coming out next year, as well as a prestige-y miniseries in the works opposite Challengers’ Mike Faist. Listening to her discuss We Live in Time now, particularly with Garfield by her side, the effect this project had on her feels enormous; she discusses it the way some people might talk about a summer abroad that changed their life, or a past relationship.

“When we finished filming, it was so weird. I mean, we’d created this whole life together and we were these people together. We would go to work and then the cameras would roll and I’d be with Tobias and he’d be with Almut,” Pugh, 28, says. “The more scenes that we did meant we were getting closer and closer to the end. It was a very hard thing to wrap your head around and realize that that’s it — you’ve now closed the door on that life and that couple and their life together, which I mean, is the movie.”

Crowley felt immediately that Pugh was the perfect Almut for the project. “I knew her work, obviously, and had seen all her wonderful performances and was a huge fan, but I’d never met her,” the director says. Witnessing Pugh’s work up close was near spiritual for him. “It’s like The Right Stuff, Chuck Yeager going through that sound barrier,” he recalls. “I mean, watching her, she’s extraordinary. And there’s something very particular about being an actor at that point when their talent is really firing on all cylinders. And it’s almost like they’re not fully in control of it, but they are.”

In the film, Almut is initially adamant that she doesn’t want to have children, and she struggles with balancing her career ambitions with her commitment to her family. It’s deeply personal stuff, which Pugh relishes bringing into the open through the film. “All of the women in my life, we talk about it constantly,” Pugh says of the decision whether or not to have kids. “I remember when I was 18 and my sister was 28, it was a conversation that my mom was having with her. It’s a conversation that all women have: what are they doing, how are they doing it, how are you going to get there? If you are that driven and you want to own the world that you’re working in and you want to feel like you’ve made it and you’re successful, the conversation of kids and when you’re going to do it and if you want it is always in the back of your mind. So I’m very grateful that I got to play a character like that because I am that story, my friends are that story.”

It’s a big thing when you start looking at yourself and looking at your life and going, ‘What don’t I like and how do I change that?’

Garfield found the themes of the film similarly clarifying. “I just feel this urgency,” he says. “I feel like I’m middle-aged now. I’m 41. And it’s like — time is ticking. I feel it more acutely than ever. It’s a day-in day-out practice of trying to suck all the life out that we can while we’re here, because yeah, it’s urgent. Maybe I’m over halfway through. Who knows what life has in store for me? For all of us?”

Garfield tells us about an iPhone app called WeCroak, which “reminds you five times a day that you’re going to die.” He goes on: “That was the original human impulse. Humans knew that we needed to be aware of [death] in order to make sure that we were living properly in accordance with other people and with all life, generally.”

Pugh looks up at this: “Let’s download it right now.”

A few weeks later, on a Zoom call with Garfield, we revisit our conversation about finding work-life balance. Soon after wrapping We Live in Time, Garfield signed on for two projects, Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, alongside Julia Roberts and Ayo Edebiri, and the family film The Magic Faraway Tree. He has also been cast opposite Daisy Edgar-Jones in a Carl Sagan biopic. It would appear that he is enjoying the pace of acting again.

“It’s like a seesaw. There’s no place where you go, ‘OK, I’ve got it figured out,’” he says. “It’s very lovely to get into a rhythm of being just in private. It’s a beautiful feeling. And getting back into the public domain is quite confronting and challenging, for all the reasons that we know.”

When we last spoke, it was near the end of a multi-city press blitz that included We Live in Time’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. How does he feel about having to get out there and sell the movie — and, in a way, himself? “I actually love [doing press] to some degree because I get to talk about things that matter to me. But also I think — no matter how much you meditate, how much you journal, how much therapy you do, how much you know yourself and love yourself and operate from that centered place — interfacing with the world innately brings up your own relationship to validation: ‘Am I liked? Am I attractive?’”

I was confused about what it meant anymore since my mum passed, because I felt like half of my drive and half of my ambition died with her.

He recalls one particular time when he felt like he was riding a high and needed to touch back down on earth. “After the Oscars two years ago, when I was nominated for Tick, Tick... Boom!, I remember the next day going for a walk with a friend,” Garfield says. “He was like, ‘How are you doing?’ I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m good. That was intense.’ And I was like, ‘I’ve just realized I’ve been in lots of rooms where people want to tell me that I’m good, and now I’m not going into one of those rooms today.’ There’s this weird comedown and it’s impossible to avoid, even if you are so aware and you can laugh at it and not take it seriously. The body receives it like, ‘Daddy, Mommy approve.’”

Ryan Gosling once summed it up in a conversation with Garfield like so: “[Gosling] said, ‘You’re just drawing when you’re a kid and you’re just drawing for the love of drawing. And one day a parent says, ‘Oh, that’s really good.’ And they put it on the fridge. And it’s like, ‘Oh my God. I’ve got to now make drawings that will make it to the fridge.’”

Garfield has ways of managing all this, including messaging with several WhatsApp groups of close friends, some of whom are other actors, all of whom can give him some encouragement — or a reality check. “There’s support that comes, or they’ll mock me, or they’ll take the piss out of me, or they’ll send me photos from our childhood, and it will just be like, ‘Oh yeah, right,’” he says. “The thing that I have to remember over and over again is that how people respond to me, it has nothing to do with my inherent value as a human being. How people respond to my work, how people respond to my beard, how people respond to my haircut, how people respond to my age, the shape of my body, something I mis-say in an interview has nothing to do with my inherent value.”

Crowley describes Garfield as being driven by a “divine dissatisfaction” on set. “He’s restless in trying to get at what the scene behind the scene you’re shooting is — he’s looking for the it,” Crowley says. “That’s a very powerful thing in him as an actor and that’s what keeps him engaged with his work and moving forward.”

We’d created this whole life together and we were these people together.

At the end of our Zoom, I ask Garfield what he thinks his life will look like in five years; he struck me as the sort of person who has considered this question. “I really hope that my body is still functioning well,” he begins. “Honestly, I think that as a foundation feels like a humble ask. I don’t need anything fancy. I just want to be able to play basketball, surf, and I don’t want to be too achy. I want to have good energy and life force, and I want me and the people in my life to be healthy and to be with each other. And I want to meet new people.”

He pauses. “Sorry, I’m getting a bit greedy now, but I’m in the beginning of midlife, and I’ve experienced a lot. I’ve seen a lot. I’ve been inspired by a lot. And I’ve discovered a lot about life and myself and the world. And I know there’s so much more to know. I’m looking for where I’m reinvigorated by the world.” The vice presidential debate aired the previous night, and politics were on his mind. “It’s very easy to get hopeless. And so I’m hoping in the next five years to feel like humanity is worth fighting for.”

At the Crosby Street Hotel, shortly after their riff on other movies to potentially tackle together, I ask Pugh and Garfield how they might introduce the other to someone who had never met them before.

Pugh goes first. “I’d say he’s very intelligent, he’s very peculiar.”

“What?” Garfield interjects, laughing.

“No, you do have peculiar energies that are really… they rub off on people,” she explains, looking at me and then back at him. “Everyone gets excitable with your peculiarities.”

“That’s nice,” he says, grinning with his whole face. (You know the grin.)

“Yeah,” Pugh continues. “And I would say you can feel free to be open because he’ll be there to guide the conversation. He’s just a very full, hundred-percent circle of a human.” Addressing him, she adds: “I think [you’re] very full in the way that you express and you chat and you do activities. And I think people need to be prepared for that. Am I right?”

“Wow, that’s really nice,” Garfield responds, clearing his throat. “That’s very sweet. Whether you’re right or wrong, it doesn’t matter to me.” He takes a breath. “[Describing] to someone who Florence is, I’d be like, ‘She is full of life. She is just chock-full of life. She is going to make you feel like her best friend very, very quickly. She’s going to make you feel really welcome; she’s going to make you feel really, really comfortable. She is going to be really curious about you. She’s going to find connection and bonding with you. She’s going to want to have fun with you. She’s going to hold your hand and take you from room to room and make you feel like part of the gang.’”

At this point, the two of them were looking right at each other.

Josh Duboff is the author of the novel Early Thirties, out March 18.