Andrew Garfield Recalls “Starving Myself of Sex” for Silence

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.”

Andrew 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.”

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.