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…