Andrew Garfield's As Addicted to His Phone As the Rest of Us

Andrew Garfield and his luscious head of hair are on the promotional trail for The Magic Faraway Tree. The adaptation of the classic novel by Enid Blyton — ask your local British person — has received a modern update with the central family seeking to reconnect with one another and the wider world instead of spending all their time on their phones. Deeply unrelatable stuff, right? But if it makes you feel any better, even Garfield, with his Spidey senses and many awards and gorgeous girlfriend, is also addicted to his digital devices.

“I’m as addicted as anybody,” he told Variety. “My screen time notifications are horrific to me. It’s like, I’ve given all of those hours to nothing. It’s genuinely enraging because we don’t have as much control over these impulses as we should, and it’s been by design. It’s pretty dark when you look at it.”

So, what does Andrew spend his doomscrolling looking at? “Weird ceramics” and “lots of Japanese kind of craftspeople.” My dude, if you need, like six hours of Japanese tea ceremonies and people making Kabuki masks, I have the YouTube playlist for you. It just feels like a les depressing waste of your time than TikToks, that’s all I’m saying.

“I think we’ve all had the impulse to smash our phones or throw it into the forest or throw it into the sea because we know it’s taking our lives from us in some way,” Garfield added. “I’m not better than anybody else […] We’ll justify addiction in whatever way we can.”

And it is addictive. You can be fully aware of how soul-sucking it is to find yourself instinctively reaching for your phone when you have a minute of peace, but that doesn’t stop you from doing it. We’re all trying to fight against a monopoly of tech bro losers, algorithms, and AI. It’s tough to go back to lives of friction and occasional boredom when the dopamine slot machine in our pockets is calling our name. And Garfield certainly knows a thing or two about that. He’s playing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in the upcoming biopic Artificial, the film that Amazon decided to drop from its release schedule rather than disrupt their consistent dumping of billions into the money hole of AI. Fortunately, the movie has been picked up by Neon and won’t be deleted from existence.

But Garfield does have one piece of advice. Keep your phone in another room. A moment of inconvenience is sometimes really helpful in getting your brain to distance itself from the hit. Just remember: every minute you’re not on your phone is a chance to make Sam Altman’s life miserable.