Andrew Garfield touched down at Deadline’s Red Sea Studio in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to talk about his recently wrapped projects The Magic Faraway Tree and After the Hunt while also lifting the lid on his thoughts of Jacob Elordi replacing him as the iconic monster in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein.
Garfield, who had just been on the jury at the Marrakech International Film Festival with Elordi, said he caught up with Saltburn actor at that festival to talk about how the project went.
“I’m very, very glad that it was him doing it and I am of course disappointed that I didn’t get to do it because I love Guillermo, I love Oscar [Isaac] and everyone that he assembled so I was disappointed,” said Garfield. “But meeting Jacob felt really serendipitous so that I could really see and hear that maybe he needed that experience more than me.”
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Garfield is just coming off the back of shooting two films at the same time this summer in Europe, starting with an adaptation of Enid Blyton’s beloved children’s book The Magic Faraway Tree. That project, which is adapted by Wonka and Paddington 2 writer Simon Farnaby and directed by Black Ops helmer Ben Gregor, boasts a stellar cast with Garfield starring alongside Claire Foy, Rebecca Ferguson, Jennifer Saunders, Nicola Coughlan, Nonso Anozie and Jessica Gunning.
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“It’s an incredible ensemble cast of strange, comedic and dramatic talent,” said Garfield of the story, which follows a modern family who find themselves forced to relocate to the remote English countryside where they discover a magical tree full of extraordinary and eccentric residents. Garfield and Foy play parents to the three children at the heart of the story.
When pressed how he felt the property, which is staple reading for children in the UK, would translate to other territories less familiar with Blyton’s work, Garfield said: “I feel like it’s one of those great stories and thematic books that will translate to every single territory. I really do believe that. I’m very, very excited for America, if they haven’t discovered these books and these characters, to find their Anglophilia in the same way they discovered Paddington in certain ways. And Asian countries as well – I think they’re going to go crazy for it.”
He added: “It’s full of imagination and insanity and wildness. It’s not your conventional children’s story or family film – it’s eccentric. It’s Alice In Wonderland-ish. The characters that are up this tree are trippy.”
Garfield then went on to shoot a very different project – Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming thriller After the Hunt, in which he stars alongside Julia Roberts and Chloë Sevigny. That project is about a college professor who finds herself at a personal and professional crossroads when a star pupil levels an accusation against one of her colleagues, and a dark secret from her own past threatens to come to light.
“We’ve been wanting to work together for a while,” said Garfield of Guadagnino. “He asked me to do I Am Love when he was making that 15 years ago. I met him and Tilda Swinton in an airport departure lounge by request and had a very exciting meeting.”
Ultimately unable to do it because of scheduling, Garfield said that he and Guadagnino “had lots of different projects they were trying to work on” including the previously announced Brideshead Revisited, which never took off.
“This one hit the magic spot for both of us,” he said before adding, “Luca is such a humanist. What reassures me is that Luca is all about the heart and all about love and eroticism and connections so he’s coming towards the material from such a humanistic angle, which I’m really grateful for.”
Check out the full interview above.