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10 Essential Andrew Garfield Performances (That Aren’t Spider-Man)


He’s played empathic pretty boys, religious figures, morally compromised hucksters, and sometimes all three at once.

At the middle of Scorsese’s pained, searching epic sensibilities and Endō’s intimate study of Christian penance and arrogance sits Garfield, who applies Father Rodrigues’ journey of enlightenment and disillusionment with a spiritual dedication that can be both fragile and obstinate — sometimes changing between them in a single line of dialogue. The biggest question mark in Andrew Garfield’s career came when Gia Coppola (niece to Sofia, granddaughter to Francis, cousin to Romy Mars) cast him as Link, a charismatic drifter-cum-influencer who, via the YouTube account of struggling young filmmaker Frankie (Maya Hawke), attacks the complacency and narcissism of the Gen-Z crowd in unanchored, inconsistent diatribes. Mainstream is only occasionally visually appealing, and its deconstruction on the internet content industry is rarely cogent or fresh, but as a disaffected nobody who gets high on his own supply of myopic cultural commentary, Garfield shows little to no inhibitions — his performance frequently veers toward “car crash” territory but always pulls itself back from the edge.

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