Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield on living through 'We Live in Time'

TORONTO (AP) — In “We Live in Time,” Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield act an entire life of a relationship — a gamut of dating, falling in love, having a child and reckoning with cancer. So when Garfield recently went on a six-day retreat in the woods without his phone, one of his first texts was to his co-star.

“I came out and I sent Florence a message. I just felt compelled,” Garfield says. “When you reconnect with yourself, you reconnect with a bunch of stuff that matters to you. And I was just like, man, I haven’t let Florence know for a few months how much this film and this time with her meant to me.”

“We Live in Time,” directed by John Crowley ( “Brooklyn,” “The Goldfinch”) and penned by playwright Nick Payne, is the kind of movie that provokes an emotional response, including for its two stars. In playing their characters, Almut and Tobias, across a decade of time, “We Live in Time” poignantly condenses, and remixes into a non-linear narrative, a wide spectrum of life. Right alongside each other are sex and heartbreak, stolen moments and life-changing ones, birth and death.

It was enough to go through together as actors that Pugh and Garfield, when they spoke the morning of the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, were still mourning it.

“I’ve never had this happen before in this way. We’ve literally spent the last two days trying to unpack it and everybody wants us to unpack it. And we don’t know,” says Pugh. “When we finished the movie, every scene that got closer and closer to the end, it became harder and harder to process that we weren’t going to be able to do it anymore.”

As two of the most in-demand actors of their generation, Pugh, 28, and Garfield, 41, have transformed themselves into all kinds of roles. They have donned Marvel costumes and joined period ensembles. Pugh was memorably outfitted in an elaborate flower dress for “Midsommar.” But “We Live in Time,” which A24 opens in theaters Friday, is a particularly unadorned view of two of the best actors working. It’s the first film in which Garfield has used his real voice.

“They’re two very beautiful creatures to look at, and have looked fantastically beautiful on screen — and do look very beautiful in this, by the way, just not in a glammed-up, aspirational fashion,” says Crowley. “They’re also both British actors who have made significant inroads in American cinema, and to some eyes, people might only know them from that. To have them speak in their own accents allowed those roles to fall back much closer to them.”

Chemistry can be a tricky thing to pin down. Crowley, whose 2007 film “Boy A” was Garfield’s feature film debut, cast Garfield first. After that came Pugh. Crowley prefers to keep dress rehearsals subdued in order to save the energy for shooting. But there were, he says, “flickers of something very special" between them.

“Much like two championship tennis players warming up, they couldn’t not once in a while hit the ball in an extraordinary way and have the other person hit it back," says Crowley.

In an interview together, the connection between Garfield and Pugh was abundantly clear. Their reaction to the meme that sprung from the movie's first image (in which a carousel horse appeared to be their uninvited co-star), was, itself, a viral video that hinted at their natural comic patter. But whatever chemistry is, Garfield is more inclined to attribute it to staying present as actors.

“You can’t predict it. I knew Florence was a magnificent actor. But that’s all I knew. I didn’t know whether we’d work together well. Neither of us did,” Garfield says. “But for me, honestly, it exceeded my expectations. It’s an incomparable thing. There’s no way of comparing my experience with Florence with any other experience I’ve had.

“I said this to Florence last night, I was like, ‘It’s weirdly, in a way, one performance. It’s like we’re stitched together.’”

For Pugh, chemistry is about showing up with the right intentions.

“We were willing and wanting to do that for each other,” says Pugh. “There’s plenty of times when you’re willing to do it and someone isn’t. And that’s also fine because you can also create your own chemistry with yourself, I suppose.

“But it’s so much more hard work and much less fun,” adds Garfield, smiling. “Just like self-pleasure.”

In some ways, Garfield and Pugh were living alongside “We Live in Time” and experiencing some of its chapters of life with their characters, albeit from different perspectives. When Almut is diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer, she is forced to make difficult decisions that weigh having children with her ambition as a chef.

“If you want to be successful, if you want to actually give your career a good crack at it, you’re going to be running through the time that is most optimum for having children,” says Pugh. “It’s stuff that I’m now having to figure out since we made the movie, since the movie’s coming out. It’s for all ages of women that are trying to navigate this unbelievably tricky dilemma.”

Some of the challenges faced by Almut and Tobias were deeply familiar to the actors. Garfield’s mother died of cancer in 2019. Others took more imagination. Neither Garfield or Pugh have children, but a lengthy birth scene, in a gas station bathroom, is the movie’s most show-stopping moment. To experience Almut’s cancer treatment, Pugh was convinced she needed to cut her hair. Crowley filmed Garfield cutting Pugh's hair for the scene.

“I wanted this to be gone now so I knew how she feels in these scenes that I’ve read in the script and thought about, but that I can’t imagine how she felt yet,” Pugh says, pointing at her hair. “I loved that day. It was a very powerful day.”

The experience has left both actors trying to hold onto something from “We Live in Time.” Garfield began the interview by opening up a book, offering a poem and then reading aloud Kabir’s “To Be a Slave of Intensity.”

“Just to remind myself that I’m a person, I guess,” he explains. “And because this film is about being as vitality alive as humanly possible. I think it’s really hard to remember how to do that sometimes — a lot of the time. In fact, it’s all set up against us doing it. So we need practices to keep us in touch with that.”

If “We Live in Time” is ultimately about making peace with the fleeting nature of all that’s precious, and trying to appreciate those moments when they’re happening, Garfield is doing his best to carry on that mentality and be grateful for the time he and Pugh had together.

“Every relationship is sacred. Every deep intimacy is sacred," Garfield says. "And I think it’s such an amazing thing and a brave thing to do to actually address it and go: This is over now. We’re ending this now — much like Tobias and Alma have to do. So I think it all becomes life, art, imitation, whichever way around.”