It’s been almost three years since he shimmied into a skin-tight red-and-blue suit, and now that there’s another Spidey in the bullpen, Andrew Garfield is becoming more and more candid about his tenure as a Marvel superhero in The Amazing Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Turns out, it was a huge letdown. “There’s something about being that young in that kind of machinery which I think is really dangerous. I was still young enough to struggle with the value system, I suppose, of corporate America really, it’s a corporate enterprise mostly,†the actor told Amy Adams about the films during their Variety actor-on-actor interview earlier this week. “I found that really, really tricky. I signed up to serve the story, and to serve this incredible character that I’ve been dressing as since I was three, and then it gets compromised and it breaks your heart. I got heartbroken a little bit to a certain degree.â€
Now that the radioactive spider is out of the bag, the Silence star has continued to unburden himself of his superhero angst. During The Hollywood Reporter’s Actor Roundtable with Mahershala Ali, Jeff Bridges, Casey Affleck, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Dev Patel, he piggybacked off Patel’s dispiriting experience working on 2010’s notoriously panned The Last Airbender. “I love what you just said, that you were looking at a stranger and feeling like you were perpetuating something that’s toxic and something that’s shallow and something that has no depth, no matter how much depth was attempted,†Garfield said. “Spider-Man was my favorite superhero, my first superhero costume when I was a 3-year-old at Halloween. I was like, there’s millions of young people watching who are hungry for someone to say, ‘You’re OK. You’re seen very deeply.’ And more often than not the opportunity is not taken, and it is absolutely devastating and heartbreaking because there is so much medicine that could be delivered through those films.†Boy, better luck to new spidey Tom Holland, right?