Steve Pratt throws a web over the career of new Spider-Man Andrew Garfield... from bullied schoolboy to the latest crime-fighting crusader

NOVEMBER 2007, a room in a London hotel. An unknown British actor is being interrogated, in the nicest possible way, by a round table of regional journalists.

His claim to fame is that he’s been cast and directed by Hollywood legend Robert Redford in his new political drama. His co-stars are equally weighty in star quality terms, namely Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise.

Andrew Garfield tells about celebrating after getting the part in war-on-terror movie Lions For Lambs. He went to the Golden Globes after-party followed by Prince’s postconcert party. “I had far too much to drink, and threw up in his toilet,” he admitted.

He has much more to celebrate now but being older and wiser, and aware of his responsibilities as a superhero, he will conduct himself as the star of one of the summer’s eagerlyawaited franchise reboots should do. His success so far in the acting business appears not to have gone to his head.

Garfield is Peter Parker is The Amazing Spider-Man. The shy, bullied high school outsider who’s bitten by a radioactive spider and acquires the ability to spin webs and swing merrily from building to building through New York as he fights the good fight against crime in the city. Between filming Spider-Man and its release, he returned to the stage, giving a Tonynominated performance as Biff, troubled son of Willy Loman, in Arthur Miller’s classic play Death Of A Salesman.

Garfield makes a habit of playing troubled teens and, although 28, is boyish looking enough to get away with portraying 19-year-old Peter Parker.

The son of an English mother and American father, he was raised in Surrey and works happily on both sides of the Atlantic. He followed the Redford movie with C4’s gritty drama Boy A, as a young man released from prison after serving 14 years for an appalling crime he committed as a ten-year-old.

He won a Bafta best actor for his efforts.

He’s an actor who puts everything he’s got into playing a role. “With everything I do, I’m pretty ill by the end of it. I found this one especially draining. I wasn’t able to do as much homework as I wanted because every day, after getting home, I just put on the TV and fell asleep,” he said.

This from someone who came into acting because he was depressed. He has spoken about being bullied at school like Peter Parker.

“I was a really sad teenager,” he said back in 2007. “I was a gymnast until I was 13, then a swimmer and then I did nothing. I started navel gazing and didn’t know what life was about. I needed some mechanism to help me figure it out and my parents suggested acting classes.”

That led to school plays and an encouraging teacher who said that Garfield might be able to make a living out as an actor. “What happened was I felt I had some kind of purpose,” he said.

He approached with trepidation the fame that came with Lions For Lambs and Boy A, having come out of drama school thinking he “wasn’t going to amount to much”. He says.

“There’s no science to it, it has to do with luck or looking right at the right time.

What Lions For Lambs has done is make me feel I don’t have to do a job just for the sake of doing a job. I have to make good choices.”

The next time we meet – in 2009 – he’s suffering from jet lag and there’s too many questions about the late Heath Ledger, his co-star who died during Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus.

His confidence didn’t seem any greater. Talk of winning awards (for Boy A and a theatre appearance) elicited his comment: “It’s ridiculous. My humility isn’t false, it’s genuine self-disregard. I try not to have an opinion of myself as an actor. If I did, it wouldn’t be a very high opinion. That would stop me being creative and attempting things.

“It’s shocking when stuff like that happens. It implants something in people’s minds, the idea that you must be good at what you do and to have that expectation of someone adds an element of pressure.”

THE pressure now is greater than ever. Both Spider- Man fans and producers expect a lot from the movie and its leading man. Last year he took time off from filming Spider-Man to promote the indie project Never Let Me Go, in which he co-starred with Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligrew. He takes the same approach to a film whether it’s blockbuster or low budget.

“It’s pretty safe to say that we all approach every job as if it was our last… and our first. It’s the first day of school and the last day of school and we’re all never going to work again,” he says.

“I don’t think it’s about taking on the perspective of, ‘Oh, here’s a big film and here’s a small film, I’d better be really good in this’. I just think you work hard at what you care about.”

You can’t help wondering how such a sensitive soul as Garfield will handle all the razzmatazz surrounding the arrival of the new Spider-Man. Well, he’s following many a Hollywood movie star by taking his co-star, Emma Stone, who plays Peter Parker’s first love, as his real life girlfriend.

Garfield has several things going for him, including a lifelong liking for Spider-Man. He was three when he went trickor- treating dressed in Spider-Man’s red and blue costume.

The story goes that the photograph of that moment helped convince director Marc Webb and the producers that he should be the new webbed wonder.

Garfield even says that the character of bullied Parker helped him through his own schooldays. “I found hope in Peter Parker’s struggles and the trials he went through week in and week out in the comics, and I connected with that. I found it fascinating, there was something very real in the way Stan Lee wrote him and created him with Steve Ditko.”

The prospect of the massive global exposure that goes with playing a superhero made him hesitate about even going up for the role. Eventually he realised he had to do it because the character meant so much to him personally.

“When I was younger, I sometimes felt trapped in my own skin,” he says. “But we all have that. That’s why this character is the most popular of all the superheroes: he is universal and uniting.

“The reason Spider-Man means so much to me is the same reason he means so much to everyone – he’s a symbol, an imperfect person in the way that we’re all imperfect, but trying so hard to do what is right and what is just and fighting for the people who can’t fight for themselves.”

Stan Lee, former president and chairman of Marvel Comics, says Garfield is perfect for the part. “He’s absolutely the way I pictured Spider-Man when I wrote him, the way he talks, the way he moves, the way he looks.”

Garfield puts it another way: “I’m a skinny English kid in a red and blue Spandex suit.”

The Amazing Spider-Man (12A) opens in cinemas on July 3