‘I miss her a lot’: Andrew Garfield telling Elmo about grief was his best work yet

Andrew Garfield has been hitting the promotional trail hard for his new film We Live in Time. Maybe, you could say, a bit too hard. There are the many, many chemistry-heavy online videos with Florence Pugh. There’s his Chicken Shop Date video with Amelia Dimoldenberg, which is less an interview and more a terrifying nexus point for one-sided online parasocial celebrity relationships. Garfield even took a cardboard cutout of Pugh to a recent red carpet event, which if nothing else signals an aggressive desire to become more meme than man.

However, one promotional pit stop has singlehandedly managed to save Garfield. Two days ago, a video of him talking to Elmo was released online. In it, Garfield discusses the death of his mother and the complicated forms that his grief has taken.

“I’m just thinking about my mum today,” he tells Elmo. “She passed away not too long ago, and I miss her a lot.” Elmo tells Garfield that he gets sad when he misses people, but Garfield replies that: “Sadness is kind of a gift. It’s a lovely thing to feel, in a way, because it means you really love somebody when you miss them … it makes me feel close to her when I miss her.”

Something like this – an actor simplifying bereavement for the benefit of a puppet – could be cloying. Yet there is absolutely no doubt that Garfield is being utterly sincere. He stumbles over some of his lines. His eyes prick with tears as he speaks. It is not, as you can imagine, something you should watch without steeling yourself a bit beforehand.

This isn’t a new subject for Garfield. A couple of years ago, he found himself discussing his mother’s 2019 death while promoting his film Tick, Tick… Boom! He fought through tears during an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. He’s spoken about it with Variety, with Channel 4, with this publication, and managed to be clear-eyed and eloquent whenever the subject came up.

To some extent, I can relate. My mum died a couple of years before Garfield’s, and in similar circumstances. Like Garfield, I had to go and promote something while it was happening. In my case it was a book that I wrote because I knew she was ill and the publication coincided with the end of her life. Going in front of people to speak about her, while it was far too close to process, was a deeply complicated thing. It was nice to be able to tell stories about her, but at the same time it was a fully groggy out-of-body experience. And I was only talking to a few hundred people at a time. Garfield had to talk to the entire world, while simultaneously knowing that most people just wanted to know if he was going to be Spider-Man again. The fortitude this must have required.

Andrew Garfield with a Florence Pugh cutout at the We Live in Time London premiere. Photograph: Anthony Harvey/REX/Shutterstock

However, in this most recent instance, Garfield at least had Elmo to help him. This must have been some comfort because there’s something about Elmo, some innate puppet magic, that allows whoever he’s talking with to be the version of themselves that they most are. Look at the video of Elmo talking to Ricky Gervais, in which the actor gripes about not being paid and then mentions the Holocaust, prompting Elmo to rail at the director for losing control of the interview.

Or look at the more recent video of the Today show, in which Larry David stormed on to the set unprompted and throttled Elmo because he couldn’t stand his squeaky voice. Would David have throttled a human interviewee? Would he have even throttled Big Bird? No, because Elmo grants people the gift of letting them be their truest self.

And so it is with Garfield. His Elmo segment let him take a step back from his memefication and talk about something that truly matters to him, with far more genuine emotion than stars often show while they’re out punting their movies. We should be thankful for the both of them.