Prior to 2 weeks ago, I had never seen Andrew Garfield in anything. Now, having seen his work in Never Let Me Go and The Social Network, I’m on the bandwagon. The guy is just plain great.
David Fincher thinks so as well. He told the LA Times that he had met with Garfield about playing Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (he was introduced to him by the director of Never Let Me Go, Mark Romanek). “I met with him and thought, ‘He’s great, he’s obviously a very skilled actor and kind of an amazing presence. He has such incredible emotional access to his kind of core humanity that I was like, ‘Why would we waste an actor like this on the part of the guy [who seems like he has] Asperger’s? I’m trying to cast somebody who doesn’t have this access.’ And that’s Andrew’s greatest strength, that’s his real musculature,” Fincher said.
Fincher gave him the part of Eduardo Saverin and he is perfect in the role.
While preparing, Garfield didn’t meet the real-life Eduardo. “It didn’t feel imperative because Aaron Sorkin wrote this incredibly detailed and idiosyncratic script in which he managed to flesh out a bunch of real people in all of their facets, so it was all there on the page. But in terms of doing some kind of mimicry performance, it didn’t feel necessary or important,” he said.
“Jesse might have had a slightly different deal because people are more aware of Mark Zuckerberg’s physicality, his mannerisms. No one knows who Eduardo Saverin is, and I don’t either. Of course, the fact he’s a real-life human being, breathing on this Earth somewhere, creates a whole new dimension to my approach because you feel a greater sense of responsibility. But not that much greater because [for] any character you feel a sense of responsibility as if they were a real person.”
