Andrew Garfield, who found fame after his breakout role as Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network (2010) and then nabbing The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), avoided s*xual relations at all costs for an Oscar-nominated film that came out in 2016 – Silence, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Garfield, 40, did show up for Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021, but he was reportedly let go after the sequel, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, as he could not show up at an event where Sony Pictures planned to announce the threequel.
However, he found work with stars like Liam Neeson (Taken) and Adam Driver (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) in Silence, where he played a Jesuit Priest, Father Sebastiao Rodrigues.
Silence, directed by a Hollywood elite, Martin Scorsese, had Andrew Garfield practice rituals that he never did for any other film. The actor, as THR mentioned, appeared on a WTF podcast by Marc Maron last year to elaborate on his experiences.
Andrew Garfield Practiced S*xual Abstinence For Silence
Silence takes the audience on a journey of Garfield’s Father Rodrigues with Adam Driver’s Father Francisco Garupe as they try to find their mentor, Father Cristovao Ferreira, played by Liam Neeson, who is somewhere in 17th-century Feudal Japan.
Garfield told Maron that the Jesuit Priests have to engage themselves in the life experiences of Jesus Christ and abstain from having any s*xual relations.
“It was very cool, man. I had some pretty wild, trippy experiences from starving myself of s*x and food at that time.”
His role in the film got him noticed across Hollywood as an actor who can adopt method acting, if need be, to a great extent, and he and Driver lost a lot of weight.
Andrew Garfield On Celibacy And Rituals
Referring to Martin Scorsese as one of the masters in filmmaking, Andrew Garfield elaborated that he extensively studied the ways of Jesuit Priests and how he was trained in it with a 31-day retreat program.
“I gave myself a year, to study with [Scorsese], study with an incredible Jesuit Priest in New York called Father James Martin, who’s a fantastic Jesuit spiritual writer; became my spiritual director for a year. I studied spiritual exercises, I created new rituals for myself. I was celibate for six months, fasting a lot.”
Not a commercial undertaking, but Silence attracted the attention of critics as it sits at 83% Rotten Tomatoes score and was included in one of the ten best films of the year by the American Film Institute, according to IMDb.
Silence is streaming on Netflix.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
