Andrew Garfield on how 'We Live in Time' helped him through grief

Andrew Garfield found healing through his latest film We Live in Time.

Garfield lost his mother to cancer in 2019, and had been grieving her since, but learnt concepts through his new film that helped him heal from her death.

In We Live in Time, Garfield’s character, Tobias, falls in love with Florence Pugh’s Almut. The duo deal with her advanced ovarian cancer, a divorce as well as go through the joy of parenthood and discover how important it is to live each moment.

In a new interview, Garfield opened up about the grief following his mother’s death due to pancreatic cancer.

He told The Hollywood Reporter: "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 shared what helped him the most when battling grief, saying, “...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.”

“But I don’t have to imagine what the other way feels like. And it’s so wonderful to know 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 two-time Oscar nominee Garfield.

Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh’s romantic dramedy We Live in Time is in select theaters on October 11.