If Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone can be friendly exes, then there’s hope for all of us

Most die-hard Marvel fans will have seen the new movie by now so I’m assuming that we all know that Andrew Garfield makes a cameo in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Speculation was rife as to whether the actor would appear alongside Tom Holland, but his continuous denegations sorta kinda convinced us he wouldn’t. 

Turns out he had us all fooled though and Garfield was so committed to it being a surprise that he basically lied to just about everyone… including his ex-girlfriend Emma Stone, who he actually met while filming The Amazing Spider-Man back in 2011. 

“Emma kept on texting and she was like, ‘Are you in this new Spider-Man film?’” Garfield answered on the Happy Sad Confused podcast when asked if he had told either Stone or director Marc Webb about his No Way Home return. “And I was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ She was like, ‘Shut up. Just tell me.’ And I’m like, ‘I honestly don’t know.’ I kept it going even with her. It’s hilarious,” he laughed. 

Hell-bent on keeping it a secret, the Tick, Tick… Boom! Star said that he never once told Stone the truth. “And then she saw it. She was like, ‘You’re a jerk’. I didn’t want to tell anyone. I took it super seriously. I told no one,” he continued. 

Giving his first interview about reprising his role as Peter Parker to Variety earlier this month,  Garfield said it’s not something he ever saw coming his way again. “I wasn’t expecting to ever have a conversation again about potentially playing Peter Parker. I felt very excited to just to be a fan again. But I got this call from Amy Pascal and Kevin Feige and Jon Watts with this idea. It was immediately undeniable. It sounded incredibly fun, incredibly spiritual – trippy and thematically interesting. On a base level, as a Spider-Man fan, just the idea of seeing three Spider-Men in the same frame was enough,” he noted.

So, why did he say yes? “The pitch was really, really enticing. They said, ‘You played this character in your way and what would you want to explore if you had an opportunity? If you were dumped into this other universe and faced with this younger you and this older you, how will you respond?’

“We talked a lot about mentorship. We talked a lot about brotherhood and about what it is to be the older brother, younger brother and the middle brother. There’s also a thing of seeing someone you love walking down a path that you’ve already walked down, and you know it doesn’t lead to the place where you ultimately meant to go,” Garfield continued.

“That character is isolated in his emotional experience and physical experience. But what happens when that aloneness gets blasted open, and you come to realize that you’ve never been alone and there are other brothers going through the exact same thing? That’s a big spiritual journey to go on, man. And then we just milked out all the fun that we could possibly have.”

Garfield was also joined by Tobey Maguire for the whole thing, which they managed to shoot across two weeks. It wasn’t a simple “Hi! Bye!” situation as the actor put it, but that’s what made their participation so meaningful. Also noting that Zendaya brings the same heartfelt, pure and loving spirit to Spiderman’s significant other, MJ, that Emma once brought to the character of Gwen, it’s clear that Garfield still has nothing but good things to say about his former flame. We’ve all heard the TikToks of him describing her as “a shot of espresso” and “like being bathed in sunlight”, right?

I can’t say I ever really expected him and Stone to have left things on bad terms, but it’s nice to know that they’re still friends all the same.