Andrew Garfield on Weight Loss for 'Silence' Role

Will Lerner
·Producer, Yahoo Entertainment

Martin Scorsese’s Silence is about two Portuguese Jesuit priests, played by Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver, who travel to Japan in search of their mentor, played by Liam Neeson. The journey is harrowing and food is in short supply, so Garfield had to lose weight off his already slight frame to capture the struggle properly.

Andrew Garfield said he didn't go cold turkey to lose weight for Silence. (Photo: Yahoo Movies)
Andrew Garfield said he didn’t go cold turkey to lose weight for Silence. (Photo: Yahoo Movies)

When Yahoo Movies attended the junket for Silence, our Kevin Polowy asked Garfield about his physical transformation for the part. “We had to lose a lot of weight,” Garfield said. “And we had to look as if we had been on a long, arduous boat trip from our native Portugal. … Right at the beginning of the film, we kind of had already gone through our dysentery phase.”

Andrew Garfield in Silence (Photo: Paramount)
Andrew Garfield in Silence (Photo: Paramount)

There was never a question that Garfield was going to drop the pounds. “The choice of what costume to wear is the same as losing that amount of weight,” he shared. “It’s just a necessary thing for the reality of the piece. So that was very challenging, not eating is very challenging.”

Garfield is no stranger to changing his body for a role. For his two-movie run as Spider-Man, Garfield did multiple-hour daily workouts. Obviously, the process for Silence was different. “You try doing it in a safe way, and you try and do it in a way that is gradual, so that by the time you start shooting, you’ve leveled out as much as possible so you’re not just kind of going cold turkey,” Garfield noted. “Because I think if that was the case, your scenes would suffer. That was always the most important thing to me — making sure I was present for the scenes. The starvation was secondary to the work.”

Scorsese and Andrew Garfield on the set of 'Silence' (Credit: Studiocanal)
Martin Scorsese and Andrew Garfield on the set of Silence (Photo: Studiocanal)

Weight loss wasn’t the only part of it; Garfield also had to grow a beard. “I let it grow out for a long time,” the Golden Globe nominee said. “I think there’s like some pretty incredible paparazzi pictures of me out there looking like a homeless 80-year-old man. Which I’m very proud of.”

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