Andrew Garfield teared up while discussing the death of his mother and his father’s response.
The British actor’s mother, Lynn, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer before he started filming The Eyes of Tammy Faye opposite Jessica Chastain.
Lynn had encouraged her son to go to North Carolina for filming in late 2019, but her condition worsened, with production being shut down so that Garfield could return to the UK and spend his mum’s last days with her at the hospice.
In a new interview with British GQ, the 39-year-old said that losing his mother had reminded him that “we’re not gonna be here long” and taught him to embrace life.
“That doesn’t provide any answers, but it does feel like it sharpens an arrow of direction, in some mysterious way,” he said. “But then, I don’t know – my dad, right now, I think, is just meant to tend his back garden.
“He’s lost his wife, and I think all he’s meant to do right now, for the most part – it’s going to make me cry – is play with his grandkids, and create this back garden… He’s gone crazy, as grief will make you do, but he’s gone toward beauty and nature and self-soothing. And I’m really kind of impressed with him for that.”
Describing how his father had created such a “beautiful” garden, Garfield began to tear up, with his voice breaking mid-sentence.
“F***. F***ing hell, man. It’s awful. It hurts – the beauty of it hurts, so much. Knowing he’s created something so beautiful out of the worst loss you could ever… They were together, in love. They were an imperfect couple that stayed together.
“And for him to be left, now, to deal with what that means – I’m not going to speak for his experience, because that’s not appropriate. But I feel like I can say: I feel like making a garden is plenty. You know what I mean? I don’t think we’re all meant to save the world all the time.”
In an interview with The Independent earlier this year, Garfield praised the production crew on The Eyes of Tammy Faye for allowing him to leave filming and see his mother.
“When I said my mum has just gone into hospice care, and I have to go, they didn’t hesitate. And they shut down production for me. And I still find that deeply moving.
“It gave me one of the biggest gifts of my life – I got to be with my mum in the last 10 days of her life. And there’s nothing more vital than that. I would have just gone, ‘I’m going!’... We left nothing unsaid to each other. We left nothing unspoken.”
