Andrew Garfield is glad he went from 21st-century Silicon Valley to 14th-century England and not the other way around.
In an interesting bit of cinematic time-traveling, the British actor filmed his lead role in the biopic “Artificial” (in theaters Dec. 25) first, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Then he veered very much the other way starring as a revolutionary farmer in the action-packed historical drama ”The Uprising” (out Sept. 10), inspired by the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt.
The latter wound up being “a palate cleanser,” Garfield says in a Zoom interview with “Uprising” director Paul Greengrass. After playing such a controversial figure, “I had a lot of rage built up to express, so that was good.”
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And rage he does. Garfield stars as Ploughman, a farmer who’s lost his family to the Black Death and then loses it on some tax collectors. They show up and harangue the locals for more money than they can afford, wanting Ploughman to even pay a death tax for his loved ones, and soldiers physically accost women. In a fateful moment, Ploughman violently fights back, sparking a countryside call to arms, and he becomes a reluctant leader for thousands who march on London against teenage King Richard II (Woody Norman).
“He's an antenna for a collective rage that I find he's not even aware of,” Garfield says. Also, “he's feeling a kind of pressure, not just from his own soul but from the souls around him and also the souls that perished during the plague.”
When Ploughman finally breaks, “the hero's journey is triggered at that point, but anyone watching this film can relate to that,” Greengrass adds. “Whether you got the unfair gas bill or something messed you up at work or whatever, there's just a general feeling people have that we've given you enough. It's enough now.”
Garfield, 43, has inhabited several historical figures in his career, from venture capitalist Eduardo Saverin (“The Social Network”) and Jesuit missionary Sebastião Rodrigues (“Silence”) to televangelist Jim Bakker (“The Eyes of Tammy Faye”) and Broadway composer Jonathan Larson (Tick, Tick… Boom!”). And in director Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial,” Garfield portrays Altman as he rises in the world of artificial intelligence, including the launch of ChatGPT, and his sudden ouster in 2023.
While Ploughman is a fictional persona in a real-life setting, Garfield didn’t approach him any differently from those other roles. “Every character has to feel real and has to feel like you have a deep responsibility to this human being, to try and make them as alive and nuanced and complicated as any other person,” he says. “There's obviously more artistic license that you get when it's a completely invented figure, but you need boundaries, you need lines to draw within.”
Garfield acknowledges it was a “fascinating and fantastic” experience going from Altman to Ploughman, and they represent “the two opposite forces in our current world, in a way.”
With Altman, “we're talking about someone in the top four or five people right now who are defining from a position of power the way that our world is traveling,” Garfield says. Whereas in “Uprising,” “I’m playing someone who's literally been of worn down to a nub of his own humanity, at the very bottom of the barrel of status and just complete disempowerment
“Ploughman does get to this place of ultimate freedom and ultimate power," Garfield adds. "He opens the lock from the inside of the cage and realizes he was free all along if he just was broken enough to accept it. It was a really cool journey just as an actor, to go from one to the other.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Andrew Garfield had 'a lot of rage' to work out in 'The Uprising'
