The most-recent live-action Spider-Man film, Spider-Man: No Way Home, remains a miracle for so many reasons. It gave closure to Tom Holland’s MCU Spidey trilogy, then used its ending to set him off on a new path. It allowed Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield to return to the franchise they helped to establish and grow, and even gave Garfield closure on one of the most emotional moments from any of the Spider-Man movies. For these and other reasons, I rank Spider-Man: No Way Home as one of the best live-action Spidey movies, and why it’ll always have a special place in my heart.
This scene, in particular, made me gasp as I sat in my seat on opening night. Zendaya’s character, Michelle, is thrown from the scaffolding of the Statue of Liberty. Tom Holland’s Spidey dives to save her, but is intercepted by the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe). Immediately. Garfield’s Peter Parker springs into action, and succeeds in a way that he previously failed. He catches MJ… and remembers how he dropped his own love, Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) back in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The look on Andrew’s face when Zendaya asks if he’s OK shatters my soul. Because I know that deep down, he’s not OK. But that rescue makes him a little bit better.
Relive the moment here:
When Andrew Garfield stopped by the ReelBlend podcast to discuss his new film We Live In Time, I had to sneak in a question about his run as Spider-Man. So I asked him about a moment he previously couldn’t discuss, which was the filming of Emma Stone’s death scene. Major spoiler. In the process, Garfield kept opening up about the similarities he encountered on Spider-Man: No Way Home, when he rescued Zendaya. As he told ReelBlend:
I kind of had the same process with Jon Watts. I was like, ‘Yo, in the middle of this romp, there's this very serious thing that I have to do.’ Usually, most of the time, I'm just improvising with the guys and talking around. And we're just trying to have as much fun as possible. But obviously this moment is a big emotional piece in the film. Yeah. So can we get specific about how you want to do that? So yeah, he was amazing with it, as well.
There’s a lot of emotional preparation that has to go into a scene like this. And few understand more than Andrew Garfield the emotional weight that the Spider-Man fandom carries for a moment like this. Gwen Stacy’s death in the Spider-Man comics was an industry altering moment. No matter what you think of Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, that film does an incredible job with Gwen’s death, thanks in large part to Garfield selling it. But as he went on to explain to ReelBlend, there are technical aspects involved, and no matter how long you prepare, things inevitably can go wrong. Garfield said:
We set it up so that Zendaya was on a platform, and that we shot my close up first. She was so cool with that. But then, I was prepped, we were just about to shoot it, and she was there. She was ready. She was being super sensitive and respectful. She knew I was in my zone, and she was just so great. And then they realized that her hair was done in the wrong way for the scene. So we had another (delay) while I'm just, like, pacing around in my Spider-Man outfit! This is the shit that happens! It just happens. It just happens. And it's just the way it goes.
Ah, the magic of making movies. You really need to listen to the entire conversation with Andrew Garfield and his We Live in Time director John Crowley. It’s a great movie, and this is a great conversation.
Andrew Garfield has had a sneaky great career, as is evidenced in that interview. Forget Spider-Man, or the performance he gives in We Live In Time. He has The Social Network on his resume. He did Silence with Martin Scorsese, a film that we KNOW the director holds very dear. He was a revelation in Tick, Tick… Boom for Lin-Manuel Miranda, and he was Oscar nominated for that film, as well as Hacksaw Ridge. Phenomenal talent who, at 41, we expect to see incredible things from for decades to come.
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