Andrew Garfield joined Good Morning America on Wednesday to discuss the importance of his new series, Under the Banner of Heaven. His passion for the project serves as a beautiful preview of the intensity of his character.
Garfield had been waiting ten years to hear what would happen with Under the Banner of Heaven, in what he calls a “deep dive into the history of Mormonism and the horrific murders that happened in the ’80s in the Mormon community.”
Knowing that his plate was full and he’d been working a lot, Garfield thought the material and the timing of this project were so important that he just couldn’t walk away.
“I just finished doing a whole host of things, and I thought, ‘Oh God.’ No, this is a really, really important story, a really important story about fundamentalism and extremes and how we’re drawn to extremes in times of crisis and in times of uncertainty and fear, and it feels unfortunately very precious and kind of important for the culture that we’re living in right now.”
Garfield also shared that he was lucky in the lead-up to the project because he could connect with someone in Utah who only spoke with him under a cloak of anonymity due to the topic of conversation. However, the person had been through a very similar situation as the character he’d be playing.
“He had been through the exact thing that my character goes through as a police detective of Mormon faith, who is having a crisis of faith because of the investigation that he was currently doing. That was kind of an unpacking of his own faith. This horrific case that he was on that was tied to Mormon fundamentalism. So as he was having to pursue the truth of this very, very disturbing case. He was also having to kind of reckon with his own, you know, the history of his own church, and it was affecting his family life it was affecting his life with his church. He was kind of faced with this dilemma of, ‘Do I go for the truth or do I go for illusion and stay close to my family?’ That’s the kind of the dynamic that my character has to go through. It’s all based on factual events, but my character is a fictionalized character, and it really, really helped to meet someone who had been through that exact struggle so that I felt like I could represent that person as well as I could.”
Robin Roberts also asked Garfield if he thought this was his year, and his humble response is just one of the millions of reasons that fans adore him — as an actor and as a person. He didn’t boast about his incredible films or focus on “his time”, he just laughed and said that he felt grateful to be part of it all.
You can see Garfield in Under the Banner of Heaven premiering on April 28 on FX.