Andrew Garfield is a master of his craft.
The "Amazing Spider-Man" actor, 39, recalled how he prepared to portray a Jesuit priest in the 2016 Martin Scorsese-directed drama, "Silence" — which also starred Adam Driver and Liam Neeson — including studying Catholicism and shadowing a real priest in New York for a year.
"I had an incredibly spiritual experience. I did a bunch of spiritual practices every day, I created new rituals for myself," he shared on the "WTF with Marc Maron" podcast Aug. 22. "I was celibate for six months and fasting a lot, because me and Adam had to lose a bunch of weight anyway."
Garfield noted that his experience filming "Silence" was "very cool," adding that he "had some pretty wild, trippy experiences from starving myself of sex and food for that period of time."
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The Golden Globe award winner also defended the "misconceptions" around method acting, which "trains actors to use their physical, mental and emotional self in the creation of a character and stresses the way in which personal experience can fire the actor's imagination," according to the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute.
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While method acting has gotten a negative rep from other stars in Hollywood, Garfield believes that there are positives to doing it.
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"There [have] been a lot of misconceptions about what method acting is, I think," he shared on the WTF podcast. "People are still acting in that way, and it's not about being an asshole to everyone on set. It's actually just about living truthfully under imagined circumstances, and being really nice to the crew simultaneously, and being a normal human being, and being able to drop it when you need to and staying in it when you want to stay in it."
The "Under the Banner of Heaven" star added that he is "kind of bothered by this idea that 'method acting's f--king bulls--t.'"
"I don't think you know what method acting is if you're calling it bulls--t. Or you just worked with someone who claims to be a method actor that isn't actually acting the method at all. And it's also very private. I think the process of creating—I don't want people to see the f--king pipes of my toilet. I don't want them to see how I'm making the sausage."
