Andrew Garfield hopes he has his late mother's 'capacity for empathy and compassion'
Andrew Garfield hopes that he has inherited the "nurturing" qualities possessed by his late mother Lynn, who worked as a nursery teacher.
Andrew Garfield hopes to have inherited his mother's "nurturing" qualities.
The 43-year-old actor has explained how he admired the capacity his late mother Lynn, a nursery teacher who passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2019, had for taking care of others.
Andrew told Esquire UK: "I hope I have my mother's capacity for empathy and compassion and care and nurturing and love.
"She was a very purely unconditionally loving person, wanting to help everybody all the time – anyone who she could get her hands on, anyone that came into her orbit.
"It was a very beautiful and exhausting quality for her. She was never pushy, but she could read people, and she could feel who needed a little extra kiss. Yeah, she was one of those."
Garfield explained that he has inherited several traits from his father Richard, including "ambition" and "anger".
The former Spider-Man star said: "I'm very aware of my dad in me: of his and my ambition, competitiveness, but also a kind of tenderness.
"He's very decent, staunchly ethical. He has a real moral rectitude. I also know I have the capacity for anger that (my dad) has.
"I labelled anger as a negative emotion for a long time, but I don't think it is. I think it's boundary-setting. So I'm down with anger."
Andrew refuses to discuss his romantic life publicly and declared that "it's not something I will ever talk about".
The We Live in Time actor, who is currently in a relationship with One Night Only star Monica Barbaro, explained: "I'll say it on the record: it's not something I will ever talk about.
"Maybe if I'm married with kids and 10 years into the relationship I might feel comfortable saying 'my wife and my kids'. Maybe. But maybe f****** not."
Meanwhile, Andrew plays OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino's upcoming movie Artificial and admits that he was "fascinated" by the part.
He said: "I think I've been fascinated since I missed that opportunity (to play Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network) – though I got given the most amazing opportunity (of playing Eduardo Saverin) and I wouldn't have it any other way – but I definitely feel I'm closer to understanding the drives, the psychology.
"With Sam, everything's a game. It's a game, and everything gets very, very simple. It's, 'I know I have to win this game, because I am the most 'good' person, and if I don't win this game, Elon Musk wins this game.'"
The September/October Issue of Esquire UK is out on 26 August.
Read the full interview with Andrew Garfield at https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/film/a73473247/andrew-garfield-interview-2026/
