Andrew Garfield says his new film, The Uprising, gave him a way to channel grief into his work, drawing on deeply personal territory as he steps into the role of Ploughman, a farmer whose entire family dies in the bubonic plague before he becomes an unlikely leader of England’s 1381 Peasants’ Revolt.
Speaking ahead of the film’s September 11 release, Garfield described his character as someone stripped down to something almost elemental by loss.
“There’s a glimmer, there is a connection there that, well, it’s there all the time, whether we’re aware of it or not,” he said, reflecting on the emotional undercurrent that runs through the role.
Garfield drew comparisons between this performance and his earlier work in Martin Scorsese’s Silence, in which he played a Jesuit priest grappling with faith.
He described the difference between the two characters’ internal struggles.
“I think that Father Rodrigues’ main struggle was with his own sense of self-importance and his own idea of his position as a spiritual leader. Whereas I think the Ploughman is so, in his humility, almost a kind of Peter Sellers in Being There, like a kind of innocence. He has been worn down to a nub of his own humanity, to the point where he’s just able to pay more attention, to listen, to hear deeply, and to have a connection to an innate wisdom and, therefore, humility.”
He added that Rodrigues’s arc was ultimately about surrendering ego and identity to find something deeper, a theme that echoes throughout much of his recent work exploring faith and grief on screen.
Director Paul Greengrass, known for grounding historical and political material in the tension of a modern thriller, said the film’s themes of economic injustice and simmering public anger felt deliberately resonant with the present moment, even though the story is set more than 600 years in the past.
“It’s just a general feeling we all understand that people, our lands, whether it’s yours or mine or Europe, all across the world, there’s this sort of roiling rage, I suppose you’d call it. Discontent,” Greengrass said.
“And I think it’s to do with something struggling to be born.”
Garfield has also spoken about the film’s spiritual dimension, describing his character’s arc as one of separating genuine faith from a religious and political system that claims divine authority to justify oppression, telling one outlet, “You’re literally living under the threat of a hierarchical society where if you question that the king is the mouthpiece of God, that’s kind of treasonous.”
The Uprising also stars Jamie Bell, Stephen Dillane, Tom Hollander, Thomasin McKenzie, Cosmo Jarvis, Jonny Lee Miller, Woody Norman and Katherine Waterston, and opens in theaters September 11.
