Andrew Garfield brings out Spider-Man's emotional side

Andrew Garfield wasn't taking any chances. He really wanted to play Spider-Man. He had done so ever since he was three, when his mother dressed him in the superhero's costume for Hallowe'en. After Marvel's gravity-defying crimefighter first made it on to the big screen, played by Tobey Maguire, in Sam Raimi's 2002 blockbuster, an 18-year-old Garfield bought a bootleg DVD copy in London's Portobello Market and immediately watched it twice, back-to-back.

This was a character he understood intimately, connected with. The alter ego of the troubled adolescent schoolboy Peter Parker was 'a beautiful symbol' to Garfield, who was born in Los Angeles and raised in Surrey. Of what?

'Hope – hope for the skinny kids,' replies Garfield who, at 28, is still slight, but his frame is at least now stretched into 6ft 1in of lean musculature. 'Hope for the underdog. Obviously the first thing that attracted me when I was three was the swinging between buildings, and that fantasy fulfilment that we all desire into our old age. Spider-Man has always been a symbol of goodness and doing the right thing and looking after your fellow man. All that good bullshit that is so cheesy to talk about, but I mean from the bottom of my heart.

'And what's fascinating,' he continues, 'is that Spider-Man is a kid – he's got his own problems, and he's trying to figure them out. All the while trying to protect a bunch of people in the greatest city on earth, New York.'

In early 2010 Garfield heard of plans for a new cinema outing, to be called The Amazing Spider-Man. Intriguingly, it was to be directed by Marc Webb, who had only one film under his belt, and a romcom at that: (500) Days of Summer. Webb was being entrusted with a rumoured budget of $220 million to revive a franchise that took $2.5 billion in its three previous instalments. Garfield pulled out all the stops to land the part. He sent the producers a picture of his three-year-old self in costume. And he put them on the spot.

'He was very concerned about the role,' Webb says. 'He asked a lot of intelligent, insightful questions that showed understanding of the character.'

'I'm such a fan of [Peter Parker], I needed to make sure that Marc and I wanted to do something similar,' Garfield says, 'and that we cared as much as each other.' Garfield needed convincing that there would be time to 'give the character its worth. So that I didn't feel like a scared little boy all the time.'

Reassurance duly received, Andrew Garfield was offered – and accepted – the role of his boyhood idol.

'It's a very narrow target, casting a role like this,' Webb says. 'You need someone who can do the depth and gravitas. But Spider-Man is also very funny and light. Plus there's the enormous physical demands… And to find that all wrapped up in somebody who can convincingly play a teenager is very difficult. Once you check those boxes, there's only a handful of actors that can pull it off.'

It's edging into Friday evening in the sheltered garden of a hotel in New York. Andrew Garfield is sipping a beer, a reward after a long day of press interviews. He's worn out, too, from the 16-week Broadway run of Death of a Salesman, directed by Mike Nichols, which ended six days earlier.

Through a glass wall, in the bar, Rhys Ifans is also in interview mode. In The Amazing Spider-Man Ifans plays the Lizard, Peter Parker's nemesis. Elsewhere in the building the American actress Emma Stone is being photographed. She plays Parker's love interest, Gwen Stacy. Having met for the first time on set, Stone and Garfield are now in a relationship.

Garfield knows his world is about to tilt on its axis – and this without considering his nomination for a Tony for his role as Biff in the acclaimed revival of Death of a Salesman. As it happens, at the awards two days later, Garfield doesn't win. But the nomination was an illustrious achievement, and the latest high in a career that has rocketed in the eight years since he graduated from London's Central School of Speech & Drama. Garfield's big-screen debut was playing a student in Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs (2007), which was followed by a Bafta-winning performance in Channel 4's Boy A in the same year. The award was recognition in part for his incredible feat of making a child-killer a sympathetic character. There was another small-screen triumph in Red Riding (2009), in which he played a dogged but chaotic newspaper reporter in the Channel 4 adaptations of David Peace's novels.

David Fincher's Oscar-winning The Social Network increased Garfield's Hollywood stature. Playing Eduardo Saverin, the co-founder of Facebook and one-time friend of Mark Zuckerberg, Garfield was a twitchy picture of energy and loyalty, but also, ultimately, of wounded betrayal. Similar qualities were to the fore in last year's Never Let Me Go, Mark Romanek's film of Kazuo Ishiguro's sci-fi tale of children bred to be organ donors.

An impressive slate, but nothing will compare to what comes next for Garfield. Even in a year in which another Marvel film, Avengers Assemble, has broken box-office records, and which also sees the completion of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, the return of Spider-Man is a big deal. To paraphrase one of the oft-quoted lines from the last set of Spider-Man films, with a great blockbuster comes great responsibility.

It is the more angst-ridden aspects of Peter Parker's duality that are so close to Garfield's heart. 'I love that pop-philosophy that's in Spider-Man,' he says, rocking back and forth in his seat, hands pushing through his thick hair. 'That's why these movies are so successful – they tap into something true. It's not just a guy climbing the side of a building. It's a guy climbing the side of a building in an existential dilemma.'

Webb talks about his film amplifying a different aspect of Parker's character from that explored by Raimi. Rather than being a geek, in The Amazing Spider-Man Parker is an outsider, a teenager marginalised by his parents disappearing when he was seven. Could Garfield, who says he was bullied at school, relate to this quality? I ask if he felt like an outsider, being a California-born child growing up in stoutly English Surrey.

'No, I didn't actually, not for those reasons. But I [have] felt like an outsider sporadically throughout my life. In secondary school I was floating – I wasn't passionate about anything. I did a little sport, but it was pretty joyless because the competitiveness was too much to bear.' Born in Los Angeles, the son of an American swimming coach father and an English teaching assistant mother, he moved to Britain with his family when he was three. Garfield became a serious gymnast as a young boy. He was ranked 'number three in the south of England' for floor routines and vault. 'I really, really loved it,' he says.

At the City of London's Freemen's School, the academic 'hierarchy' was perceived as 'doctor, lawyer, business, intellectual… And if I applied myself I could have done those things, I think, because I'm a hard worker and just from graft I could have gone on.' To compound his unease his brother, three years his senior, was on his way to a career as a doctor. 'So yeah,' he acknowledges, 'there was a shadow that I was caught in.'

Not knowing 'what I wanted or who I was', Garfield tried 'artistic things'. After showing no skill for painting or music, at his mother's suggestion he tried acting. With a role, aged 15, in a John Osborne play, Kids, 'I felt at home.' A teacher told him he that he could potentially 'do this as a living… and I was in.' Garfield took A-level drama, then secured a place at Central School of Speech & Drama, graduating in 2004. 'All I needed was someone to say, "You're good at this" for me to believe it
and chase it.' He began working as a stage actor, landing parts at Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre and at the National Theatre in London, while also picking up the occasional tele-vision part before getting the call to star in Lions for Lambs.

To help him climb those buildings during the shoot in New York and in the studios in Los Angeles, Andrew Garfield put in the hard work. He spent six months with a health and fitness trainer, while also working with a stunt team and learning trampoline, basketball, martial arts and parkour skills. He also drew on his childhood sporting prowess: 'There was so much fun to be had with the stunts – I studied athletes like Philippe Petit in Man On Wire [a 2008 documentary] – that high-wire feeling is the thing to achieve. Man overcoming human obstacles. Like watching Ronaldo play, or Muhammad Ali box. That lightness, eloquence and poetry.'

He sought similar fluidity in the web-slinging. 'I didn't want it to be a guy just going pshew, pshew,' he says, shooting out his wrists. 'I wanted it to be [like] a conductor,' he nods, waving and flicking his hands like a maestro in full orchestral flow. 'I wanted it to be an artist. A spider artist!'

Garfield's fitness was only one of the attributes Webb required from his leading man – his emotional range is vital too. As Mike Nichols says, with Death of a Salesman he knew he had to cast a young actor strong enough to play son to Philip Seymour Hoffman's Willy Loman. Nichols first heard of Garfield from friends who had seen him aged 22 playing Romeo in Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Exchange Theatre. He was then impressed with Garfield's acting in The Social Network. 'The scene where Eduardo realises they've taken the whole thing away from him, that showed Andrew's enormous emotional equipment,' Nichols says. 'You don't get that very often in a young actor.'

'Andrew doesn't shy away from characters having doubts about themselves,' David Fincher says. 'He's amazingly connected to his humanity. And he helps the audience find a real way into characters like that.'

When I recount similar testimonials praising his 'vulnerability' from Terry Gilliam (who directed him in The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus) and Boy A director John Crowley, Garfield bats away the compliments. 'That's just me being sensitive! That's just who I am,' he shrugs. 'Which is OK. And I guess I've found a place where I can express that. And it's useful.'

Ask him where that quality comes from, and Garfield professes not to know. 'I was just born that way, man – thin-skinned and kind of sensitive.' He adds that listening to Neil Young and Cat Stevens is good for switching-off, 'or anything that [gets me] out of my head. Music, surfing, reality TV…'

Garfield has a savvy fear of celebrity, 'of you as a person overtaking you as an actor'. Webb, however, told me he had no fears about how his superhero will cope with becoming super-famous. Garfield, he was sure, was too clever and grounded to…

'To like myself?' Garfield interjects, grinning.

No, to be swept away by blockbuster success.

Garfield shakes his head. 'I think "clever and grounded" is a nice way of saying I have a healthy amount of self-loathing. And a lack of belief in myself.'

Sure…

'No, no, no, it's true!' he insists. 'I'm realistic. And I don't think I'm any good. Mike Nichols says this to me – he wrote me a beautiful letter. He said, "Don't worry about losing yourself, because you don't think you're any good, and that's never going to change. And thank God – it means you'll keep striving and working hard. And you won't settle on an island somewhere!" '

In a recent joint interview with Tobey Maguire, the last Spider-Man told the next Spider-Man that on the opening weekend of the 2002 film 'so much shifted in my life… it was shocking'. Did hearing that give Garfield the collywobbles?

'No,' he replies with a slow shake of his head. 'I just want it to happen now, so that I know what it is – so I can surrender to the rapids,' he says, using one of his favourite metaphors for the plunging swirl of fame. 'Just let it be.'

'The Amazing Spider-Man' is out on July 3