Andrew Garfield Says Making New Movie We Live in Time Felt ‘Healing’ After His Mother’s Death

For Andrew Garfield, working on the romantic dramedy We Live in Time felt “healing” after losing his mother to cancer in 2019.

In the movie, Garfield’s character, Tobias, falls for up-and-coming chef Almut (Florence Pugh), who learns she has late stage ovarian cancer. The story, which is not told chronologically, shows the couple’s relationship over the span of several years as they meet, fall in love, start a family and grapple with Almut’s diagnosis.

Garfield — who has been open about the grief he felt after his mother, Lynn, died from pancreatic cancer five years ago — talked about loss in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

When asked about how his personal experience ties in with the film and telling this story on the screen, Garfield, 41, replied, “I’m not special in that regard. It’s garden variety in a way. And in my processing of my grief, one of the most healing and reassuring, soothing moments I’ve had, is realizing that this has been the way it’s been since time immemorial.”

“Sons have been losing their mothers, daughters have been losing their mothers [since the beginning of time]. We’re lucky if it’s that way around, rather than the other. And of course, countless parents lose their children in one way or another too, I can’t even imagine what that must feel like,” continued the two-time Oscar nominee.

“But I don’t have to imagine what the other way feels like. And it’s so wonderful to know how how ordinary the experience is in terms of how universal it is, while it is still so very, very truly, uniquely extraordinary to the individual,” said Garfield.

He added that he has, in the past, struggled to accept what happened to his mother.

“There’s so many moments, of course, that I’ve had in the last five years of saying, ‘Well, she shouldn’t have died. My mother shouldn’t have died so young, and she shouldn’t have died in suffering, and she shouldn’t, she shouldn’t, shouldn’t, shouldn’t.’ It’s so arrogant of me. It’s so egotistical of me when I’m in those moments. And it’s human. I’m not shaming myself for it. It’s a human response, because it it doesn’t make sense, it feels unjust, it feels unfair,” he said.

“Every species of every living thing on this earth has lost a mother. Young dinosaurs were losing their mothers. So in terms of my own personal experience, yeah, it felt like a very simple act of healing for myself, and hopefully healing for an audience.”

In 2021, Garfield opened up about Lynn on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

“I love talking about her, by the way, so if I cry, it’s only a beautiful thing,” Garfield said. “This is all the unexpressed love, the grief that will remain with us until we pass because we never get enough time with each other, no matter if someone lives until 60, 15, or 99.”

“So I hope this grief stays with me because it’s all the unexpressed love that I didn’t get to tell her. And I told her every day. We all told her every day, she was the best of us,” added Garfield.

We Live In Time is in select theaters on Oct. 11 before a wider release later in the month.