Andrew Garfield (born August 20, 1983, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) is an American-born English screen and stage actor, known for giving his roles a unique vulnerability and emotional depth. Garfield began his acting career onstage and gained international celebrity with roles in such films as The Social Network (2010) and The Amazing Spider-Man (2012).

Early life and stage performances

Garfield was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Los Angeles, and as a child he moved with his parents, Richard and Lynn Garfield, and elder brother, Benjamin, to Epsom, Surrey, United Kingdom. He began acting at a young age, joining a youth theater workshop and performing in productions. He graduated from the famed Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London in 2004. Garfield’s first stage roles include the Manchester Royal Exchange’s productions of Barry Hines’s Kes (2004), for which he won the MEN (Manchester Evening News) Theatre Award for best newcomer for his role as Billy, and Romeo and Juliet (2005). In 2006 he received the prestigious Evening Standard Theatre Award for outstanding newcomer for his performances in Beautiful Thing, Burn/Chatroom/Citizenship, and The Overwhelming that year.

Television and film roles

In 2005 Garfield launched his onscreen career, appearing in the British teenage television series Sugar Rush. After a guest role on Doctor Who in 2007, Garfield starred in the movie Boy A (2007) as a young man recently released from prison for committing murder when he was a juvenile. His performance garnered him a BAFTA Award for best actor. About the same time, Garfield broke into Hollywood feature films, appearing in the ensemble drama Lions for Lambs (2007) alongside Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise.

Budding onscreen career and breakthrough in The Social Network

After his Hollywood debut, Garfield performed alongside Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson in The Other Boleyn Girl (2008); Heath Ledger in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009); and Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan in the film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2010). He also continued to take roles on television, starring in the Red Riding (2009) series, for which he received rave reviews. His career reached international acclaim when he assumed the role of Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network (2010), a film about Facebook’s founding. He received nominations for both a BAFTA Award and a Golden Globe for his performance and was credited with “raising the emotional stakes” of the film by movie critic Peter Travers in Rolling Stone.

The Amazing Spider-Man

In 2012 Garfield signed onto Marvel’s Spider-Man revival, The Amazing Spider-Man, in the lead role of Peter Parker, opposite actress Emma Stone. They both starred in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), but subsequent installments were canceled because of the movie’s poor box-office performance and mixed reviews. Years later Garfield made a welcome appearance alongside his Spider-Man predecessor, Tobey Maguire, and successor, Tom Holland, in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021). Critics applauded him for transforming the hapless teenage hero of The Amazing Spider-Man into the haunted middle-aged Parker of Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Film roles from the late 2010s

Other film roles from the 2010s include Desmond Doss in Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge (2016), a real-life World War II medic who refused to bear arms but managed to save 75 soldiers during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. Garfield received an Academy Award nomination for his performance. He also appeared in Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016), an adaptation of the novel by Shūsaku Endō. Garfield played Father Rodrigues, a 17th-century Jesuit monk who travels to Japan to find his mentor (played by Liam Neeson). He took the role to heart, attending a Jesuit silent retreat in Wales and identifying the film as a galvanizing experience for his ongoing spiritual journey. Garfield also had starring parts in Breathe (2017), a biopic of Robin Cavendish, a newlywed who is paralyzed after a severe case of polio, and in Under the Silver Lake (2018), an off-the-wall neo-noir.

Onstage roles from the 2010s

In between movie roles, Garfield continued to act onstage. He made his Broadway debut in 2012, playing Biff Loman, the eldest son of Willy Loman (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) in a revival of Death of a Salesman. In 2017 Garfield starred as Prior Walter in the National Theatre, London, production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and returned to the role in 2018 during the show’s Broadway run. For his performances, he won an Evening Standard Theatre Award for best actor and a Tony Award for best leading actor in a play.

Are you a student?

Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.

Subscribe

Roles from the 2020s

In the 2020s Garfield starred as a social media influencer in Mainstream (2020), Gia Coppola’s satire about Internet culture, and as Jim Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021), the story of the infamous televangelist couple. While Garfield was filming the latter, his mother died from pancreatic cancer, and he later spoke about how he was able to channel his grief into his next role as Rent playwright and composer Jonathan Larson in tick, tick...Boom! (2021). For the film, Lin-Manuel Miranda adapted Larson’s autobiographical script about his struggle to find success as an artist. Larson never had a chance to fulfill that goal while he was alive, because he died unexpectedly from an aortic aneurysm at age 35 in 1996, just before Rent became an international hit. Garfield received extensive vocal training for the film and was nominated for another Oscar.

In 2022 Garfield took on the role of Jeb Pyre, a Mormon detective, in the adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s novel Under the Banner of Heaven. He next costarred with Florence Pugh in We Live in Time (2024). The romantic drama, which is told in a nonlinear narrative, centers on the couple Tobias and Almut, the latter of whom has terminal cancer.