The Social Network - Andrew Garfield interview

ANDREW Garfield talks about playing the key role of Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network, some of the challenges that involved and what he feels about Facebook in real life and the movie’s relationship to it. He was speaking at a UK press conference...

Q. Is it fair to describe Eduardo Saverin as the hero? He’s the guy who tries throughout the film to do the right and honourable thing? Is that your take on him?
Andrew Garfield: I agree with you, he is the hero and the only righteous…. [stops and laughs] No, no, no! I think it’s valid that you had that feeling about Eduardo and it fills my heart with warmth because I care about him deeply, of course, as well. And I believe that everything he was doing was righteous and correct and he was the best behaved.

But I think that if you asked Jesse [Eisenberg] or Justin [Timberlake] they’d feel the exact same way about their characters. I think that’s a testament to Aaron [Sorkin]’s script and the story. It’s a multi-perspective look on one very, very complex situation: the inception of this incredible device. So, I feel like certain people will come away thinking that Eduardo had a lack of imagination, to not be able to keep up with the other guys in that respect, and others might come away thinking that he was too trusting or too naive of this person who was supposedly his best friend. He should have seen signals earlier.

Of course, my own perspective is that… during shooting all of us had very, very righteous perspectives on that. We needed to have that in order for the story to work. But in retrospect, I can look back and I can watch the film, or look back on that time, and go, well, ‘no’, I think what Justin’s character did was justified, what Jesse’s character did was justified and that’s a real testament to this story. I don’t think we often get the chance to sit in a movie theatre and be confused and be torn about grey characters that we see in front of us. We’re usually presented with a good guy and a bad guy, a hero and a villain, and I think this film incredibly asks us to make our own minds up and use our brains, which can’t be a bad thing.

Q. Do you use Facebook or does your celebrity force you to miss out on using such a phenomenon without an alias? And looking from the outside in, what do you make of the fact that so many people are addicted to it?
Andrew Garfield: I used to use it like most people but I’m four months clean now and I’m proud of myself for it and starting to set up a support group for people like me… No, I think it’s a wonderful thing. Of course, the last time I used it was a charity event I was doing and we managed to make four times more money that we would have been able to previous to the invention of Mark Zuckerberg, but in terms of my own opinion… I think Aaron put it very well the other day. I think that no matter what your relationship to Facebook is, or any kind of social media, it won’t have any impairment on your enjoyment of this film.

I don’t think this film is actually so much about the device of Facebook as the circumstances of the young, ambitious, hungry young men who created it and who had some hand in it. It’s about the bigger themes of what it is to come of age and to deal with whatever those themes are, whether it’s power, ambition, money and greed, as well as loyalty, brotherhood and betrayal. I think the film is more about that.

Q. What kind of feedback have you had, if any, from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo or Sean Parker? And, in approaching the roles, did you feel the need to study any film or did you have any footage of them?
Andrew Garfield: Aaron wrote an incredibly detailed script, which was meticulously researched with integrity because he had no choice but to do that. His own moral compass told him to do that and he also had an external legal obligation to do that. So, we all went in with total confidence. You could see that as soon as you read the first scene that this was authentic and genuine. For any actor to have that amount of detail and humanity as a starting point and a finishing point is a true gift and a rare gift.

So, I feel like all of the work was pretty much done, and that’s maybe not giving us as much credit, but that’s OK. There were, of course, certain elements that I needed to think about outside of that, for my own personal… to not go insane. Eduardo was born in Brazil and raised in Miami, and I was not born in Brazil or raised in Miami, and so I needed to understand culturally and physically and vocally what that means. That’s an example of one of the things I had to research myself. But I will say that this script was pretty damn good!