Andrew Garfield Recalls ‘Starving’ Himself of ‘Sex and Food’ for 2016’s ‘Silence’ Movie: ‘I Had Some Pretty Wild, Trippy Experiences’

usmagazine.com:

Giving it his all. Andrew Garfield opened up about the lengths he went to to play a priest in the 2016 Martin Scorsese movie Silence.“I had an incredibly spiritual experience,” the England native, 39, said on the Monday, August 22, episode of the “WTF With Marc Maron” podcast. “I did a bunch of spiritual practices every day, I created new rituals for myself.

I was celibate for six months — and fasting a lot because me and Adam [Driver] had to lose a bunch of weight anyway.”The Amazing Spider-Man star and Star Wars actor played 17th century Jesuit priests who travel to Japan to find their mentor.“It was very cool, man.

I had some pretty wild, trippy experiences from starving myself of sex and food at that time,” Garfield explained.In order to get into character, the Under the Banner of Heaven star participated in the Ignatian spiritual exercises, which were created in the 1500s.“It’s basically a 31-day retreat that you do where you actively meditate on the life of Jesus Christ, and you place yourself using your imagination into every stage and scene and moment in the life of Christ from his conception to his resurrection,” he explained.Garfield added that the exercise is “more than just sitting and thinking” about Jesus. “You are actively, imaginatively creating a relationship with Christ through a series of prompts and questions and you end up in a pretty deep space.”The Tony Award winner’s father is Jewish, but he wasn’t raised very religious at all. “I had a relationship with an imagined Christ by the end,” he said.His dedication to imagining himself in someone else’s shoes — in this case, Jesus Christ — is really what method acting is based on rather than any kind of imposition on a movie’s crew. “I’m kind of bothered