Between his recent Golden Globes victory for Tick, Tick… Boom and his no-longer-secret return to the Spider-Man universe last month, Andrew Garfield has plenty to celebrate. But it wasn’t always this rosy for the movie star.
In a recent interview withEntertainment Tonight, Garfield said was “desperate” to be cast in Disney’s mid-2000s Chronicles of Narnia franchise, but lost out on the role of Prince Caspian in a way that seems hard to fathom today.
“I auditioned for Prince Caspian in ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ and I thought, ‘This could be it, this could be it,’” Garfield said. “And that handsome, brilliant actor Ben Barnes ended up getting the role. I think it was down to me and him, and I remember I was obsessed.”
As for why things didn’t go in his favor, Garfield reflected on what his agent told him at the time, after he begged her to explain why he didn’t land the role.
“She eventually just broke under my incessant nagging and she was like, ‘It’s because they don’t think you’re handsome enough, Andrew,’” he said. “… Ben Barnes is a very handsome, talented man. So in retrospect, I’m not unhappy with the decision and I think he did a beautiful job.”
Garfield has been back in the headlines for a minute now, thanks to his role in the aforementioned Spider-Man: No Way Home. He recently admitted that it was “rather stressful but also weirdly enjoyable” to pretend he wasn’t in the film for so long.
“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,” he told The Wrap. “And I kept imagining myself purely as a fan of that character, which is not hard to do,” he explained. “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.’”
