Andrew Garfield (‘tick, tick… BOOM!”) on ‘one of the more profound experiences I’ve had on any set’ [Complete Interview Transcript]

Andrew Garfield is now nominated at the Oscars for a second time thanks to his heartfelt performance as theater composer Jonathan Larson in “tick, tick… BOOM!” The actor earned his first nomination in 2017 for the film “Hacksaw Ridge.”

Garfield recently spoke with Gold Derby senior editor Denton Davidson and contributing writer David Buchanan about his own theater background, figuring out the best way to play Larson in the Lin-Manuel Miranda-directed film and the emotional intensity of the material. Watch the exclusive video interview above and read the complete transcript below.

Gold Derby (David Buchanan): Andrew, it’s such a pleasure to talk to you today. I wanted to start with “tick, tick… BOOM!” and your experience on stage because “tick, tick… BOOM!” started as a stage musical and is all about the theater, obviously, as Jonathan Larson was a composer. So I was wondering how your experience on stage in both “Death of a Salesman” and “Angels in America” really helped you kind of understand the world that Jonathan Larson worked in and lived in and helped you approach performing his work? 

AG: Yeah, I mean, I’m a theater actor first and foremost. I studied in drama school in London, at the Central School of Speech and Drama, and graduated when I was 20. And then I did theater for three years in London, in Manchester, and around the U.K. and I fell in love with theater in drama school and even before that in high school. It became my second home, maybe my first home, maybe my predominant home, actually, and I felt most myself there. I felt most allowed to be my whole entire self. I think that’s what most people who engage in the theater feel. They suddenly feel like, “Oh, I’m not as alone as I thought I was.” It’s a real kind of community that you get jumped into. And then, of course, having started to do films and then kept my theater work going and my theater muscles moving with “Death of a Salesman” and “Angels in America,” arguably two of the masterworks of the last century in terms of theater, when I was introduced to Jon Larson and his work through Lin and him asking me to come onto this project, it was like, again, just kind of being introduced to an old brother that I didn’t know existed. I felt so akin to him, even though I’m not a writer myself, let alone a musical theater writer, I felt like he already was alive in me somehow and there wasn’t much interpretation I needed to do. It was more about just allowing the Jon in me to emerge and to come through. And there was another element that was interesting, which is a more spiritual element of the energy of Jon and the essence of Jon and his spirit. 

When someone has that much energy and inspiration and passion and impact on the world, and they die at a young age, at the age of 35, in terms of the specifics of Jonathan’s death, I think they leave… I remember when Heath Ledger passed away. He was in his late 20s and we were doing the Terry Gilliam film together, and it’s just a very impactful thing when such a great artist leaves us at the height of their powers. And that’s the same with Jon. But the personal experience I had with losing Heath was, there’s this excess amount of energy that gets left behind because there was so much more to do. There was so much more to make. There were so many more performances. He was going to direct, he was producing music, he was starting a record label. There was all of this creativity that was on the verge of arriving, and I think the same thing with Jon. So for me and for Lin, it was like, how do we harness the energy of Jon and let it move through our set? Cut a hole in the ceiling of every set that we were on and allow Jon to be that magical element that was moving through all of us and most particularly myself, how do I open myself up? Say a prayer to Jon every morning and say, “Follow your impulses and I will be your vessel. Let me help. Let me just serve you and how you want to live again while the cameras are rolling.” And it was a really kind of beautiful experience in that way and the fact that we had Julie Larson, Jon’s sister, there with us as a producer and actually at the monitors a lot of the time was another tremendous inspiration. 

Gold Derby (Denton Davidson): And some of the scenes are direct recreations of footage of Jonathan, like the performance of “tick, tick… BOOM!” at the New York Theater Workshop. Where do you begin interpreting that material and how do you capture the spirit and essence of Jonathan as a performer, as well as the physicality he gave with each performance? 

AG: Yeah, I mean, we had this amazing footage of Jon doing “Boho Days,” which was the original title of “tick, tick… BOOM!”, which went through lots of different permutations. And that was really key for me, and I would just kind of immerse myself in that footage. And of course, I would pick up specific physicality things that I thought were hooks and keys, but also, again, as you say, a kind of energy and a kind of essence that you’re looking to embody, capture, let move through you. What was so clear to me is that he was singing and playing for his life and for the lives of everyone around him, and I saw what he was doing in “tick, tick… BOOM!” as this very anti-commercial, after the failure of “Superbia,” it was as if he had to reaffirm his own… It was all that song, “Why.” “tick, tick… BOOM!” feels like he’s in that song. He’s trying to figure out why he would carry on, how he would carry on, and if it’s worth him carrying on doing what he’s doing. And it all felt like a ritual, like a very personal, sacred ritual of, “No matter if I’m playing to 5,000 people or 15 of my closest friends, this is what I have to do and I am going to spend my time this way.” So I think that’s what “tick, tick… BOOM!” and “Boho Days” was. It was this kind of cathartic practice ritualistic thing where he was going, “This isn’t for anyone but me, my friends, the people that we’ve lost, the people that we’re losing, the people that are sick and lonely, and for artists that have been told ‘no’ over and over and over and over again, and this is my attempt to respond to the ‘no,’ to the rejection, to the failure. If any producers want to come into that door and watch this show, you are family. I’m not playing for the culture, I’m not playing for the industry, I’m not playing it to get this on Broadway, I’m playing it because I just have to play it.” And I think that’s what he had to do for himself and for his own giftedness and for his community, especially those that were being affected by AIDS.

So I feel like it became this kind of ritual, and that was very, very important for me to kind of capture in his performance, and it was, yeah, fighting, singing, playing for his life and for the lives of everyone around him, literally, in terms of his friends with HIV, but also more metaphorically and spiritually in terms of, he was fighting for the soul of the artist to not be defeated by commercial interests or material interests or to be commodified. So I think it was a real attempt to get underneath all of his own egoic desires in a way, to let his ego kind of break publicly so that he could get down into his real creativity, the soul of his creativity, writing about what he knows, which obviously, it’s the bridge that leads to his opus, his ultimate last piece, which was “Rent.” And without this very sacred ritual, this very personal ritual, “tick, tick… BOOM!”, we wouldn’t have “Rent.” 

GD (David): Yeah, your answer is really capturing so much of the emotional intensity that the film captures in just, I think it’s about a week of time that the film chronicles in Jonathan’s life. How did you, with Lin-Manuel Miranda, who directed the piece, how did you both kind of tackle the emotional intensity of the piece and also as an actor, just come to set prepared and to pace yourself through some really big moments in Jonathan’s life and prepare yourself to do that? 

AG: Yeah, I mean, it’s so funny. Well, a lot of things that led to us being able to just be very, very present on set and be overtaken, basically. Allow the muses and whatever creativity wanted to happen that day to happen. And I think, obviously, Lin has been preparing for this since he saw “tick, tick… BOOM!” and had his own personal kind of revelatory freakout, realizing what he had to do with his life and walking out of a downtown theater after seeing a production of “tick, tick” and being totally disturbed by it and realizing that his life was over because he had to devote it to writing the next great American musical, which he did. So, obviously, he’s been prepping for this for a long time. And then in terms of a nearer past, he set up a situation where we were rehearsing it like a play, and I had a year. I had a year since finishing “Angels in America,” at least a year, over a year, a year and a half, to immerse myself in Jon and his life, his music, his friendships, his romances, and to really just kind of dip myself into that stew. And to the point where I think, again, we were able to wake up every morning and be haunted by Jon. That was always the north star.

I remember saying to Lin after I saw the first cut, I was so moved by it and I just said, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for honoring Jon in this way and for honoring the work of the actors.” Because he loves everyone, he loves his actors. He really took care of the actors in the edit so much. I said, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” And he said, “Well, no offense, I’m glad you feel good, but no offense, I had bigger fish to fry. I didn’t want to be haunted by the ghost of Jonathan Larson for the rest of my life.” And that really was the guiding light of every morning, of every day. And it’s exhausting. Like, it is exhausting. Jonathan is exhausting. You’re exhausted watching him spin through this film, bursting at the seams, his head bursting, his heart bursting.

There was a line in the original “tick, tick… BOOM!” which they had to cut after he passed away because it felt insensitive at that time, and the line was, “Sometimes I feel like my heart is going to explode.” And that’s very, very symbolically perfect in terms of who Jon seems to be, and ultimately his heart did explode. He died of an aortic aneurysm. So there was some weird, strange knowing that he had about the shortness of his life and maybe in an unconscious way, I would say, I find that very, very interesting. So yeah, I mean, those were the things that we were really being driven by, and we kind of let Jon run amok. We let him off the leash and he kind of told us how to do it, and we followed. That was kind of it. 

GD (Denton): And an emotional climax of the movie is “Why,” performed at the Delacorte Theater. Could you talk about the emotional journey of that song and your own experience playing it to the 1,800 empty seats at the Delacorte during the pandemic, while live theater was completely shut down? 

AG: Well, we actually shot that at the end of the first week of shooting, which was pre-pandemic. And that was kind of interesting, the stuff that we shot. We shot the rest post-pandemic, including the New York theater workshop stuff. So playing “tick, tick… BOOM!”, the one-man show “tick, tick… BOOM!” in the New York Theater Workshop to a very small audience of extras and crew was very, very profound while all the theater was shut down. But “Why,” that song “Why” at the Delacorte in the middle of the night was definitely one of the more profound experiences I’ve had on any set. Because the song, the monologue, the song, whatever you want to call it, the moment, again, a ritual, it’s the most profound journey one can go on in the space of four minutes, from facing death and choosing life, basically. That’s how I interpreted it.

It’s hard to talk about because it’s so mysterious, because what Jon is going through is meeting an impossible moment that he doesn’t want to meet. And only by diving down into the wound of that moment, of the potentiality of losing arguably the closest person, the person he loves the most in his life, one of them anyway, his best friend, Michael, by facing that reality, which is the reality he’s been running from all the way through this story up until now… Of course, he has to face it at the piano. The piano is the instrument that enables him to travel down into the depths of himself. And what he finds there is images. It’s mysterious what happens and it’s all spontaneous. He’s singing the images as they come to him. It’s happening to him. The song is happening to him. So that’s obviously very hard to play, a song that is ostensibly being improvised spontaneously and found in the moment in order to move through his darkest night of the soul to come through, and he doesn’t know where it’s leading at any given moment. So to play that, of course, is a fascinating challenge.

But yeah, you kind of stick with the images and you allow the images to take you where they want to take you. “‘When I was nine, Michael and I, we entered a talent show at the YMCA,’ and for whatever reason, this image is coming and I’m going to sing about it and I’m going to remember it. I don’t know why this image is coming. Why is this image coming? Oh, that was the moment where I realized what I wanted to do with my life, that was the moment where I understood how great life could feel. And I remember making a promise to myself that this is how I was going to spend my time. How much time does my friend have? How much time do I have?” And then another image comes and it’s, “Oh my God, wait, and this was the other most important part of our relationship when we did ‘West Side Story’ in high school. I guess this is coming because, why is this coming? I made a vow and I carried on the vow. And now I’m wondering, is it worth me carrying on, the thing that I thought I was meant to do in light of the fact that, is it the most important thing for me to be doing while my friend is dying and all of my friends are dying and I’m just singing songs? I’m sat on a piano, singing songs and that brings me to this moment. And where are we now? Oh, I’m still doing what I’m doing, but my friend is making his money elsewhere.”

And in the process of that final, “over and over and over and over and over,” and Lin and Alex Lackamoire added in extra “over and over and over and overs” for that moment, for some mysterious, ritualistic reason, which leads to that “Finishing the Hat” thing, the Sondheim thing, and I wake up after sitting at the piano at 9 a.m., I wake up after a thousand “overs and over and overs” and it’s five o’clock and I have to go to the diner. And then I’m flooded with, “Oh, this is the only way I can spend my time.” And I think in that moment he starts to connect. “I don’t have a choice about how I spend my time, and actually, how I spend my time has to be connected to my friend. Whatever I create at the piano, whatever I create has to be about healing his heart, healing his wounded-ness, healing the wounded-ness of my community,” and I think in that moment, it’s the beginning of “Rent.” It’s the beginning of “tick, tick… BOOM!” and it’s the beginning of “Rent,” and it’s the beginning of him using his giftedness to heal his people, to heal himself.

And I think he realizes in that moment, “Oh, I’m definitely going to do what I’ve got to do, but I’ve actually got to do it even more fuller to the hilt and it’s not about ‘Superbia’ here and try to critique society in a way that is kind of didactic. It’s actually about the heart. It’s actually about the soul. And it’s actually about saving lives through art and really addressing the agony that my friend is in through my art.” It’s a beautiful place that he gets to, that I got to find my way, and it was the second take and we all felt it. We sang the song live three times on three close-ups, and I said to Lin, I was like, “Start with the close-up because who knows what’s going to happen? Who knows where this is going to go and it needs to feel alive, and I don’t know where this is going to go.” Obviously, the first take was the first pancake and it was a bit of a mess and it wasn’t perfect. And the second take wasn’t perfect, but it definitely got to the depths of that place, and the journey felt very, very clear. And that’s what he ultimately used in the film, and it felt like, “Oh, thank God, we have something sacred here and we have something that Jonathan would feel good about, and Julie was there and she was feeling really good about it and really moved by it.

Anyway, it’s a long answer, but it’s an impossible question to answer in a short manner. I love that song, and I’m so glad that we got to do it live and I’m so glad that we got to do it in that sacred way. And they had the recording clean enough to use. So that was really, really cool.

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