Caution: SPOILERS for Spider-Man: No Way Home follow below
By now, most superhero fans have probably seen Spider-Man: No Way Home — it’s already made over a billion dollars at the box office, after all — meaning they know the big twist: the movie features the returns of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, both of whom played Peter Parker in previous Spider-Man movie series. It was a whole multiverse-theme mess, and people loved it.
Of course, fans knew that Maguire and Garfield were back long before the movie hit, because this thing leaked like a battleship made of swiss cheese. But the team was determined to keeps things on lockdown anyway. “All these leaks were happening, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, guys, what the hell is going on? I’m working so hard here to stay secret, and then here’s an image of me with Tobey!’” Garfield told TheWrap. “And they’re like, ‘No, no, we’re gonna keep it quiet.’”
During the lead-up to No Way Home, Garfield was promoting his Netflix movie Tick, Tick… Boom!, and lots of journalists took the opportunity to ask him if he was returning as Spider-Man. Garfield, ever the good soldier, denied his spandex-covered butt off. “I was happy to do it, but it was a lot of work on everyone’s part,” he said. “It obviously gave people a big thrill in the theater, and what more do you want from a theater experience than a thrill?”
Andrew Garfield found lying to Spider-Man fans “thrilling”
At one point, Garfield even claimed that a leaked picture showing him and Maguire on set during the film’s Statue of Liberty climax was photoshopped; that’s how committed he was. He called the process “rather stressful, but also weirdly enjoyable” and “thrilling,” likening it to a game of Werewolf (basically the same thing as Mafia), where one player has to pick off the others without arousing suspicion.
“It was like this massive game of Werewolf that I was playing with journalists and with people guessing, and it was very fun,” Garfield said. “There were moments where I was like, ‘God, I hate lying.’ I don’t like to lie and I’m not a good liar, but I kept framing it as a game. And I kept imagining myself purely as a fan of that character, which is not hard to do … It’s been a rare experience to play that mass game of Werewolf with every single Spider-Man fan in the world.”
"I placed myself in that position of, ‘Well, what would I want to know? Would I want to be toyed with? Would I want to be lied to? Would I want to be kept on my toes guessing? Would I want to discover it when I went to the theater? Would I want to be guessing, guessing, guessing?’ I would want the actor to do an incredibly good job at convincing me he wasn’t in it. And then I would want to lose my mind in the theater when my instinct was proven right. That’s what I would want."
This kind of thing is happening more and more these days — I’m reminded of when Game of Thrones star Kit Harington had to go on talk shows after Jon Snow was killed denying that he was returning to the show. In both cases, it all worked out for the best.
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h/t SyFy Wire