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The Global Chronicle

Andrew Garfield Recalls ‘Trippy Experiences’ From Starving Himself of Food and Sex for a Role

Author

Robert Young

Updated on February 21, 2026

Andrew Garfield is diving into the lengths he’ll go to for a task. On the latest episode of the WTF With Marc Maron webcast, the 39-year-old performer revealed how technique acting has given him remarkable experiences.

During the conversation, Garfield inspected how he landed into the position of a seventeenth century Jesuit clergyman for the 2016 Martin Scorsese film, Silence.

“I had an incredibly significant experience. I did a ton of powerful practices reliably. I made new traditions for myself. I was pure for quite a while, and fasting an extraordinary arrangement, since me and Adam [Driver] expected to lose a ton of weight regardless,” Garfield said. “There were all of the extraordinary practices we got to do while we were petitioning, considering, having all of the assumptions we had as those characters. It was incredibly cool, man. I had some wild, trippy experiences from saving myself from sex and sustenance for that time span.”

Garfield was first drawn to strategy acting after he screen-attempted with Ryan Gosling for an endeavor.

“I was overwhelmed. I was like, ‘This individual has figured something out. He’s achieving something on a more significant level here,'” Garfield looked into of Gosling. “… He was alive. He could never have thought often less about doing it the same way over and over. He was tuning in, he was uncommonly present, he was unconstrained, he was surprising. He wasn’t endeavoring to be those things, he was essentially present.”

“There was a Zen quality to it, but it looked like being in a scene with a wild animal where you didn’t know whether he wanted to kiss you or kill you,” he added. “Furthermore, a while later you kind of guide into that. You go, ‘Thoughtful, I want to follow whatever is.'”

the way andrew garfield raise his eyebrows makes me wanna scream…

— ø (@verionra) August 24, 2022


Eventually, Garfield, who actually gained an Emmy assignment for his show in Under the Banner of Heaven, had the choice to connect with Gosling’s acting tutor, Greta Seacat, who got him into the demonstration of procedure acting.

“There’s been a lot of misinterpretations around what procedure acting is, I think,” Garfield said. “… Individuals are at this point acting in that way, and there’s compelling reason need to zero in on being an a**hole to everyone on set. It’s just about living really under imagined conditions, and being genuinely wonderful to the group simultaneously, and being a regular human perpetually having the choice to drop it as required and staying in it when you want to stay in it.”

“I’m to some degree irritated by the off track judgment,” he continued. “I’m fairly irritated by this considered ‘method acting’s f**king bulls**t.’ It’s like, no, I don’t think you comprehend what procedure acting is if you’re calling it bulls**t.”