Andrew Garfield

Andrew Russell Garfield was born on 20 August 1983, in Los Angeles, California, to Richard Garfield, a California native whose parents were also from the United Kingdom, and Lynn Garfield (née Hillman), who was from Essex, England. When Garfield was three years old, the family relocated to the United Kingdom, and he was raised in Epsom, Surrey. He attended Priory Preparatory School in Banstead and City of London Freemen's School in Ashtead. He describes himself as a "Jewish artist" and is Jewish on his father's side; his paternal grandparents came from Jewish immigrant families who had moved to London from Poland, Russia, and Romania, and the family surname was originally Garfinkel. His parents operated a small interior-design business, his mother also worked as a teaching assistant at a nursery school, and his father became head coach of the Guildford City Swimming Club. Garfield has an older brother who is an NHS doctor at Royal Brompton Hospital. In April 2025, he appeared on the British television program Who Do You Think You Are?, through which he uncovered Jewish roots in Kielce, Poland, and discovered that a great-grandaunt, Ruchla Garfinkiel, had married the first cousin of Władysław Szpilman, the subject of the 2002 film The Pianist.

Garfield began taking acting classes in Guildford, Surrey, at the age of nine and appeared in a youth theatre production of Bugsy Malone. He had originally intended to study business but became interested in acting at sixteen when a friend persuaded him to take theatre studies because the class was one pupil short of being able to run. He subsequently trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, graduating in 2004. His first job was at Starbucks, where he worked across three establishments in Golders Green and Hendon. Upon graduating, he focused primarily on stage work, winning a Manchester Evening News Theatre Award for Best Newcomer in 2004 for his performance in Kes at Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre, where he also played Romeo the following year. He received the Outstanding Newcomer Award at the 2006 Evening Standard Theatre Awards.

Garfield made his British television debut in 2005 on the Channel 4 teen drama Sugar Rush and gained wider public attention in 2007 when he appeared in series three of the BBC's Doctor Who, in the episodes "Daleks in Manhattan" and "Evolution of the Daleks." That same year, he was named one of Variety's "10 Actors to Watch" and made his American film debut in the ensemble drama Lions for Lambs, alongside Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, and Robert Redford. Also in 2007, he portrayed a notorious killer attempting to rebuild his life after prison in the Channel 4 drama Boy A, a role that earned him the 2008 BAFTA Award for Best Actor. In 2008, he appeared in The Other Boleyn Girl and was named one of the Shooting Stars at the Berlin International Film Festival. The following year, he held supporting roles in Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and the Red Riding television trilogy.

In 2010, Garfield co-starred with Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley in Mark Romanek's dystopian science-fiction drama Never Let Me Go, an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, for which he won the 2010 Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor. That same year, he co-starred opposite Jesse Eisenberg in David Fincher's The Social Network, playing Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. He then achieved broad international recognition by starring as Peter Parker and Spider-Man in Marc Webb's Spider-Man films from 2012 to 2014, a role he reprised in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021. His subsequent film work includes Silence (2016), Under the Silver Lake (2018), The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021), and We Live in Time (2024). He received Academy Award nominations for his performances as Desmond Doss in the war film Hacksaw Ridge (2016) and as Jonathan Larson in the musical drama Tick, Tick... Boom! (2021). On television, he starred in the crime drama miniseries Under the Banner of Heaven (2022), earning a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series. His accolades also include a Golden Globe Award, and Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2022.

On Broadway, Garfield's career spans 2012 to 2018. He made his Broadway debut as Biff Loman in the 2012 revival of Death of a Salesman, a performance that earned him a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play. He returned to Broadway with Angels in America, performing the role of Prior Walter in both Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. He had previously played the role in the West End production, for which he received a nomination for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor. His Broadway performance in Angels in America brought him the Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play in 2018, as well as the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Play that same year.