STORY OF A HEART
From shooting his sticky stuff in The Amazing Spider-Man movies and earning an Oscar nomination for the gritty war drama Hacksaw Ridge, to treading the boards on both sides of the pond for his Tony Award-winning turn as Prior Walter in Tony Kushner’s landmark Aids play Angels in America, Andrew Garfield is not one to back down from a challenge. In fact, the British actor sniffs them out.
And Andrew certainly didn’t wrinkle his nose when Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda tapped him up for the lead role of Jonathan Larson, the late composer and playwright behind Rent, in his feature directorial debut tick, tick… BOOM!. The part would require Andrew to sing, like sing, and well, he didn’t know how to sing, or yes, sing, professionally. Unperturbed, the selfproclaimed “warrior for art” was determined to rise to the occasion – and, boy, does he raise the proverbial roof.
Inspired by Larson’s autobiographical musical of the same name, Netflix’s absolute lung-buster of a film – also starring Alexandra Shipp (Love, Simon), MJ Rodriguez (Pose) and Robin de Jesús (The Boys in the Band) – tells the story of Larson who, on the cusp of his 30th birthday, is racing against the clock to prepare for a workshop of what he believes to be his masterpiece, Superbia, all the while wrestling with crippling debt, an increasingly strained relationship with his girlfriend (Shipp) and, most pressingly, the creeping devastation of the Aids crisis on his circle of friends.
In a tragic twist of fate, Larson passed away, aged 35, from an aortic aneurysm on the morning of Rent’s first off-Broadway preview show. He was later honoured with a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
Jumping on a video call from Calgary, Canada, where he is on location filming, 38-year-old Andrew explains why this project was the most “profound” of
