Andrew Garfield jokes about brother's baldness, tears up about losing his mother on 'The Late Show'
Monday's The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was a family affair.
Andrew Garfield was Colbert's guest, with his older brother, Benjamin, and father, Richard, in the audience. The camera panned to Benjamin and Richard as Colbert asked Andrew the age difference between him and his brother, and when the 38-year-old actor said three years, Colbert held back a laugh.
"Three rough years, is what I'm saying," Colbert jested before tussling Garfield's full head of hair to point out the stark contrast to Benjamin's bald head. "Look at this mop. And you look fantastic, but I would not have picked you out of the crowd. This seems like a dominant genetic factor in the family."
"I got my mother's genes," Garfield noted. "My brother got my father's. My brother is a doctor, and I'm merely an actor, so there's a good reason for him to have lost all his hair. He's a pulmonary doctor. He's a lung doctor. So for the last two years, this mother hubbard has been saving people's lives."
That turned into an impromptu standing ovation for Benjamin:
Later in the interview, Garfield became much more somber while discussing the loss of his mother, Lynn, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2019.
"I love talking about her, by the way," the one-time Oscar nominee said while tearing up. "So if I cry, it's only a beautiful thing. This is all the unexpressed love, right? The grief that will remain with us until we pass because we never get enough time with each other—no matter if someone lives till 60, 15 or 99. So I hope this grief stays with me because it's all the unexpressed love that I didn't get to tell her."
"And I told her every day, we all told her every day, she was the best of us," Garfield continued. "So for me, I was able to step into [Tick, Tick... Boom!] in a way where I could honor this incredible life of Jonathan Larson, and he was taken far too soon. He died at the age of 35, on the night of the first preview of Rent off-Broadway."
Tick, Tick... Boom! is based on the semi-autobiographical musical written by Larson of the same name and follows the late composer in 1990—five years before he wrote Rent—as he works at a New York City diner while trying to write the next great American musical. The film debuted in select theaters and on Netflix last Friday (Nov. 19), starring Garfield as Larson and marking Lin-Manuel Miranda's directorial debut. (In real life, Larson died suddenly in 1996 due to an aortic aneurysm caused by Marfan syndrome.)
"The film is to do with this ticking clock that we all have," Garfield concluded with Colbert. "That we all know somewhere deep down that life is sacred, life is short, and we better just be here as much as possible with each other, holding onto each other. And for me, I got to sing Jonathan Larson's unfinished song while simultaneously singing for my mother and her unfinished song."
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