Andrew Garfield Explains the Robin Hood Energy in The Uprising

Andrew Garfield is out of the loop. 

The British actor has been unplugged lately, so much so that he still hasn’t seen Spider-Man: Brand New Day or The Odyssey. As a result, he certainly wasn’t tracking the recent marketing confusion surrounding his new film The Uprising. 

On Aug. 20, the campaign for Paul Greengrass’ period action drama seemingly rebranded itself as a stealth Robin Hood movie, prompting a collective “wait, what!?” from the internet. It appeared that the film had been retitled The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood, though the subtitle was later clarified to be a tagline rather than a new title. Subsequent promo spots reinforced that the title remains The Uprising. (Greengrass’ original title during the scripting phase was The Hood.)

The commotion recalls what happened with Garfield’s romantic drama We Live in Time a couple of years ago. A first-look image of Garfield and co-star Florence Pugh riding a carousel became a viral sensation thanks to the crazed-looking carousel horse sharing the frame with them. Garfield, for his part, welcomes any and all bizarre flukes if they help attract moviegoers to his films that lack radioactive spiders.

“We’re in a time of chaos. There’s no formula to getting people to see a film,” Garfield tells The Hollywood Reporter. “However that happens — whether it’s me eating chicken wings with hot sauce, or people talking about Robin Hood or a deranged horse — I just really believe in [The Uprising]. Whatever gets people to see it in a communal experience, like they’ve been doing all summer with other movies — that’s my hope, my dream and my prayer. So bring on the deranged horse.”

Set in 1381, The Uprising centers on Garfield’s grieving farmer, known only as the Ploughman. Alongside real-life leaders Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) and John Ball (Jamie Bell), the fictional character sparks the Peasants’ Revolt in an effort to stop the excessive taxation imposed on England’s peasantry by the council of oligarchs acting on behalf of King Richard II.

Garfield believes the historical event mirrors the world today, particularly in the United States. Citizens on both sides of the aisle have become increasingly disenchanted with billionaires spending record sums to influence elections and policy while increasing their own net worths and driving up the cost of living for everyone else. Garfield even remarked at a recent Q&A for The Uprising that he hopes the 1 percent are “scared shitless” by his and Greengrass’ new film.

“There’s a universal rage we’re all feeling. There’s a kind of imprisonment that we’re all suffering under, and it’s keeping us from our sense of belonging to this earth, to ourselves, to each other and to the dignity of our own souls,” Garfield says. “We are all deeply longing for a reconnection to that belonging, and it’s not simple to get there because it means traveling down. It’s not ascension. There’s an obsession that we have right now with ascending above all of our issues and even going to another fucking planet to do it. That’s going to solve nothing.”

The moniker of the Ploughman is a reference to William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, which predates the Peasants’ Revolt. The 14th-century work contains the first literary reference to Robin Hood, though the legend of the outlaw existed in some form as early as the 13th century. The Uprising posits that the efforts of England’s lower classes helped inspire and amplify later tales of the hooded, bow-wielding outlaw seeking justice. Historians have even connected the Great Uprising to principles that would later inform the U.S. Constitution.

The Uprising ultimately contains allusions to Robin Hood and his iconography, but Garfield says the film is more interested in capturing the influential spirit of the famed outlaw. In other words, don’t expect the character to announce himself as Robin Hood à la Batman or Iron Man.

“The Robin Hood aspect is more of an emergent energy and archetype within our story,” Garfield says. “It’s a figure that starts to emerge from the unconscious and the ground during periods of time when common folk are feeling disempowered, abused, violated and separated from the dignity of living their own lives.”

Below, during a conversation with THR, Garfield also addresses Jesse Eisenberg’s decision not to return as Mark Zuckerberg for Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network companion, The Social Reckoning. He then discusses his outlook on the future after playing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial.

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I really enjoyed The Uprising. The one caveat is I know I would’ve enjoyed it even more had the recent marketing kerfuffle not happened. For whatever reason, the universe refuses to preserve the surprises in some of your movies the last five years.

(Garfield gives a knowing smile.)

Was Uprising’s allusion to Robin Hood always going to be unveiled in the marketing? 

This all went over my head a little bit. I’m three weeks sober from social media.

Lucky you.

Yeah, it feels really weird, but good. So [the marketing kerfuffle] passed me by a little bit, but I really trust Focus. I trust Paul [Greengrass]. I trust this film to find the people that it’s meant to find. 

The Robin Hood aspect is more of an emergent energy and archetype within our story. It’s an archetype and a folk hero that predates the Peasants’ Revolt, but it’s a figure that starts to emerge from the unconscious and the ground during periods of time when common folk are feeling disempowered, abused, violated and separated from the dignity of living their own lives. There is this archetypal energy that starts to rise up, and I love that arc. 

I love the archetypes of the Green Man and Robin Hood and how they connect with the Ploughman and the other people who are struggling and realizing that the system is not in their favor. In fact, it’s against them and the dignity of their souls. Their outlaw energy then comes from creating and connecting and finding belonging. Whether or not they’re being given permission from on high, that belonging is an inherent birthright, a belonging to this earth, which those archetypes signify and symbolize.

One of the movie’s taglines is “witness the birth of a legend,” and I mention that because I covered The Death of Robin Hood a couple of months ago. Beyond just titles and taglines, both movies work rather well as bookends. Do you know if that film affected your rollout plans at all?

Not that I know of, no. I haven’t seen that film yet, but I’m very curious and excited to do so.

Uprising’s marketing fuss reminded me a bit of the We Live In Time commotion involving the photo of you and Florence Pugh with the deranged-looking carousel horse. You can do all the right things to market an original movie, but then it’s something completely random that catches fire. Is it frustrating that this is what it takes for non-franchise movies to get on people’s radars these days? 

It’s a question that feels a bit beyond my pay grade in a way. I make the films I want to make, with the themes and the soul that I want to put into the world, and whatever gets people to see them gets people to see them. We’re in a time of chaos. The world has no center right now. Pattern recognition is impossible because everything is full of randomness, so there’s no formula to getting people to see a film.

There’s everything we can do when we believe in the story we’re telling, and then there’s everything we can do to make sure that people are aware of it. And however that happens — whether it’s me eating chicken wings with hot sauce, or people talking about Robin Hood or a deranged horse — I just really believe in this film. Whatever gets people to see it in a communal experience, like they’ve been doing all summer with other movies — that’s my hope, my dream and my prayer. So bring on the deranged horse.

Ploughman says he’s not a soldier or a man of the cloth. He’s just a humble farmer according to him. But his combat skills are second to none, and he has sharp instincts on the battlefield. He can sense perfidy before it happens, and he can identify the optimal evacuation point in the throes of battle. Is he withholding his true past? Is he charmed?

I don’t think it’s either. In that era, you had to be able to fight. There was a survival instinct, and it wasn’t from formal training. There was just a hunter-gatherer kind of need that you had, whether it was with animals or neighboring places or within your own village. There was a physical, rough-and-ready rhythm to men of that era. They had a protective instinct and a physical ability. 

In terms of his [evacuation] instincts, I can attribute that to his closeness to the land and to nature. He has nourished in himself a kind of indigeneity and a belonging to the rhythms of nature and its seasons. It develops as the story goes because he is worn down to the essential core rawness of his own instinctive humanity. We pick up the story when he has this thin layer of identity still, a little crust around the jewel of the deep self. And then he’s finally forced onto his knees in humiliation by the end.

Ploughman reaches a level of rage that I’ve never seen from you on screen. Smashing a laptop is rageful, but this is something deeper and more existential. To get where you needed to go, did you channel his imagined memories or your own memories?

It becomes an amalgamation. That includes not only your own personal memories and experiences, but also ancestry, imagination and empathy. Right now in the world, there’s a universal rage that people are either aware of, or they’re avoiding, or they’re kidding themselves about. There’s a universal rage we’re all feeling, and there’s a deep longing to reconnect to the water of life, to the source of what it is to be a human being. There’s a loss of soul, and I’m even emotional talking about it now.

There’s a kind of imprisonment that we’re all suffering under, and it’s keeping us from our sense of belonging to this earth, to ourselves, to each other and to the dignity of our own souls. We are all deeply longing for a reconnection to that belonging, and it’s not simple to get there because it means traveling down. It’s not ascension. There’s an obsession that we have right now with ascending above all of our issues and even going to another fucking planet to do it. That’s going to solve nothing. 

I feel like the solution is the opposite, counterintuitive way, which is down. It’s down through all of our pain, all of our rage, all of our agony and anguish. Our woundedness is actually the quality that connects us all. We’re all deeply wounded, and underneath all of that is a connection to the deepest part of ourselves. Down there is where we find our connection to nature and to each other. That’s where we realize we are the custodians of this miracle that is called life and Planet Earth, rather than dominators of it or victims to it.

Ploughman is your latest of several characters who undergoes a crisis or loss of faith. You’ve also explored a character recently who exploited people’s faith like King Richard II does in Uprising. Have these more recent roles — Ploughman, Jim Bakker, Jeb Pyre — altered any of your conclusions from a decade ago during Hacksaw Ridge and Silence? 

I don’t know about conclusions. God, it’s a complicated thing, and it’s so tough to talk about because it’s so personal. But I crave what I was sharing before, which is a collective or communal connection. Our current systems are not serving our deep connection to this earth and our belonging to this life. We have to fight tooth and nail a lot for that. The world right now is very uncentered. There is no center. There is chaos. There is anxiety. There is fear. There is a disparate falling apart of our current systems, which I think is necessary and good. As that’s happening, it’s important for us to find our own centers and start to bring that to the [fore], so that a new system can start to be created from something that’s more genuine.

When you met Jamie Bell on the Uprising set, did either of you bring up the 2010 screen test you had in common?

(Laughs.) No, we didn’t talk about Spider-Man. I don’t think we did.

The people reading this will undoubtedly want to know your thoughts on Tom Holland’s new Spider-Man movie. Have you had a chance to see Brand New Day yet?

I haven’t seen it yet. I’ve been a bit off the grid, but thank God it’s still in theaters, so I’m going to try and see it. I haven’t seen The Odyssey yet either. I’m the only person alive who hasn’t seen these movies, but I hear that they’re both phenomenal. So I’m very, very excited to go and support my friends. The movies are back, baby.

As I just proved, you know firsthand how roles can follow you everywhere you go. I imagine there are mostly pros than cons to it, but for some people, the scale tips the other way. So how surprised were you that Jesse Eisenberg didn’t want to reprise his role for The Social Network’s quasi-sequel, The Social Reckoning?

Surprised, not surprised — I don’t know. He was so quintessentially perfect in that character and in that film. I don’t know the interior workings of his mind as much as I would like to because it’s one of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever come across. So I don’t really have an opinion on it particularly, but I love Jeremy Strong, Aaron Sorkin and the whole cast [of The Social Reckoning]. Aaron is one of our great writers, so I’m really excited to see it.

Your upcoming movie, Artificial, is about another Zuckerbergian figure named Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. Based on everything you’ve learned, have we already rendered ourselves obsolete? 

The toothpaste is definitely out of the tube, but that doesn’t mean we’ve rendered ourselves obsolete. I have a lot of hope. I have a lot of hope that humanity will prevail and that the soul of humanity cannot be replicated and artificialized. Artificial intelligence, the name is on the tin. It’s artificial. It’s not soul intelligence. It’s not human intelligence. That’s my perspective, and God knows I’ve been wrong before, but I believe deeply in human beings. I believe deeply in the unreplicable nature of the human soul and the human spirit. I want to tell stories that speak to that, and I want to stay connected to that. Listen, new tools are great, but for me, it’s not going to replace the experience of going to the movie theater or the theater or seeing some live music.

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The Uprising opens September 10 in movie theaters nationwide.