Andrew Garfield is one of the most celebrated actors of the generation with incredible movie titles to his credit including his most recent critical stunner romance comedy, We Live in Time starring alongside Florence Pugh. The actor recently shared that he was largely inspired by legendary The Dark Knight actor Heath Ledger who played the Oscar-winning character Joker in the Christopher Nolan-directed DC hit before his untimely demise. Garfield remembered the good memories he had with the actor.
Andrew Garfield Says Heath Ledger Was A Beacon
Heath Ledger and Andrew Garfield. Image Credit: Lionsgate
Heath Ledger’s portrayal of Clown Prince of Gotham in DC is considered one of the greatest performances of all time while the actor claimed immense global fandom making Joker a pop-cultural phenomenon. Now, remembering the legendary actor who passed away in 2008, Andrew Garfield revealed that he was a beacon.
Speaking with Josh Horowitz, Garfield shared his experience working with Ledger in Terry Gilliam’s 2009 adventure fantasy The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
“I think he was a kind of Beacon,” Garfield said of Ledger. “He was, it was like, a wild animal and he had just done the the Joker. He had just finished doing, um, The Dark Night and he was he was so smug about it,” he added.
“I was like, ‘how did that go?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, it’s going to be good.’ And then like, I remember like his Empire magazine cover came out and he was like, ‘I’ll use the f***ing s**t photo and I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me? Dude that looks incredible. He’s like, ‘no the pose is all wrong, it just looks like a kind of like a conventional version of what no you’ll see.’ I’m like, ‘yeah I did see. like yeah.”
Garfield further added that Ledger was “so free and so wild and so kind of dangerous on set in a way that was the kind of thing that that is inspiring and spontaneous.” He would often say before every take, or sometimes just once per scene, “Let’s have some fun with this one.” It was a reminder to everyone, and Garfield couldn’t help but smile, thinking, “Yeah, let’s have some fun with this one.”
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus also stars Christopher Plummer, Verne Troyer, Lily Cole, Tom Waits, Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law.
Andrew Garfield Has Heath Ledger’s Memento
Heath Ledger. Image Credit: Lionsgate
Garfield revealed that at the time of filming The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, he was trying to get it right and “I think I was in the stage of my career or like development as an actor where I was really concerned with getting it right or being good.” He continued adding that his approach to acting was “kind of very narrow way of approaching creative work” but he was very concerned with “how I looked or concerned with not being bad and just how dampening that can be to creativity.”
However, Garfield said that Ledger was the opposite and he could learn a lot from him, again asserting that “Heath was a beacon for” him. Although Ledger left a huge void in cinema with his untimely demise, The Amazing Spider-Man actor keeps his memento as a token of memory which reminds him of his early days in his career.
“I still have like lots of mementos of his. I remember like the first day I met him he was wearing these amazing cam, camo Ray-Ban sunglasses and I just said, ‘hey, cool sunglasses.’ He was like, ‘oh yeah,’ and the next day, he, they were like in my dressing room, he just left them for me. He was just a very generous, like yeah, beautiful, creative spirit.”
Rent The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus on Apple TV, Amazon, and other VOD platforms.
