Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy on rebooting Enid Blyton: ‘You can be responsible, or stay true to outdated ideas’

It’s been just a few months since filming wrapped on the buoyant household movie The Magic Faraway Tree, and its two stars have the slight air of getting frolicked in some type of great spa. “It was nice,” says Claire Foy, serenely. “I felt quite relieved to be playing a version of a mother that didn’t have to come with a whole side of trauma and grief.” Andrew Garfield nods. “I think joy was the priority,” he says. “It felt very, very different to whatever hell I usually experience as the character I’m playing.”

It’s true sufficient: Foy and Garfield – solid in Faraway Tree as a pair of benevolent dad and mom who transfer their household to a ramshackle countryside fixer-upper – have been by the mill these days. Foy comes to this off the again of movies like H is for Hawk (a heart-rending drama about grief), All of Us Strangers (one other heart-rending drama about grief), and Women Talking (a biting drama about sexual assault). Garfield, in the meantime, has not too long ago been seen enjoying a predatory school professor within the spiky After the Hunt, and the husband of a girl with most cancers within the superlative weepie We Live in Time. Even within the all-action Spider-Man: No Way Home, his remorse-addled superhero was doing a hell of a number of crying.

Faraway Tree, then, was a welcome sojourn in additional frivolous environment. Adapted and up to date from the traditional youngsters’s novel by Enid Blyton, the movie follows the Thompson household: Polly (Foy), Tim (Garfield) and their three children (Delilah Bennett-Cardy, Billie Gadsdon and Phoenix Laroche). Exploring the native woods, the kids come throughout a transportive tree that’s house to magical eccentrics, amongst them the elfen Silky, performed by Nicola Coughlan, and the blustery Moonface, performed by Nonso Anozie.

Written by Paddington 2’s Simon Farnaby, it’s a mild movie, full of color and attraction. What tears it does shed are principally comfortable ones. “It’s a warm hug in a warm bath… consensually,” laughs Garfield. “Spiritually.”

Garfield and Foy are talking to me on a three-way video name, sat on their respective sofas. They are in breezy spirits, cracking jokes and riffing off each other’s solutions. It’s an ease that comes from a protracted, settled familiarity: the pair first labored collectively a decade in the past, on Breathe, a biopic about incapacity activist Robin Cavendish. (At the time, Garfield was recent off an Oscar nomination for the warfare drama Hacksaw Ridge, whereas Foy was midway by her reign on The Crown as a younger Queen Elizabeth.) “We had such a special, important time on Breathe together that reuniting felt really right,” says Garfield. “There’s a level of trust and care there, I think.”

They’re breezy, too, in Faraway Tree – Garfield in full-bore goofball-dad mode, Foy nonetheless good-humoured however with a teflon competence. “Comedy is not something that comes naturally to me,” she admits. “I can be silly, and take the piss out of myself, but I’m not very good at delivering a punchline. I don’t have any pretensions of thinking I’m good at it. I mean, I felt I was quite straight in the film.”

Garfield rushes to appropriate her: “Oh, you’re very funny in it.” She positively had her moments, I agree. Foy smirks. “Are they intentional, though, we ask ourselves…”

At least Garfield has extra follow when it comes to comedy: he was humorous, in a schlubby, dank-smelling type of approach, within the mischievous neo-noir Under the Silver Lake, and has twice hosted Saturday Night Live. But Faraway Tree was its personal new frontier. “It’s the good fortune of ageing,” he says, “and being here longer on this planet, and weaving through opportunities of work, and not-work… You realise what you do on set is much less important than what you previously imagined it to be. Not in a kind of negative way, and actually in a very liberating way – where you go, ‘I’m gonna try this, and I’m gonna try that, and we’ll maybe do another take, and maybe we won’t.’”

Both actors appear to mild up once they communicate of their baby co-stars. “They’re the least precocious children you could ever meet,” says Foy. “So grounded.
It’s like being around animals: the baggage isn’t there in the same way. They were professionals, but they were also children.” Garfield appears genuinely perturbed as he considers the prospect of reuniting with the youngsters on the premiere. “I’m terrified of anyone’s voice having dropped,” he says. “I mean, they’re just going to be really tall. I don’t want it.
I don’t want any facial hair on that boy’s face.”

Shooting Faraway Tree made Foy, 41, mirror on her personal baby – the daughter she shares together with her ex-husband, the actor Stephen Campbell Moore. Her parenting, she says, entails a “much more shouty” method than that of her onscreen counterpart. For Garfield, 42, it was a immediate to ruminate on his personal childhood. Born in California, the longer term Spider-Man grew up in (pleasant neighbourhood) suburban Surrey. He has no youngsters – but. “I’m just in awe of the process,” he says. “And Claire’s an incredibly good mother. But it’s definitely all part of my education, and I’m sure that will go out the window as soon as I’m lucky enough to do it myself. I’ll be the most shouty of all the shouting people.”

Foy jumps in: “Shouting’s really great and good.
It gets a bad rap, but really, it’s great.” “You got your headline,” drawls Garfield.

It’s not fairly an elephant within the room – or even an elephant lurking, muted, on a fourth Zoom display – however sooner or later, we’ve got to speak about Enid Blyton. Even throughout her lifetime, Blyton’s books had been criticised for his or her racism, classism, and sexism, issues that make fashionable variations one thing of a fraught proposition (although that hasn’t stopped folks from making an attempt). Farnaby’s script takes a figuring out, dismissive method to Blyton’s bigotry, acknowledging it and, in locations, revising it.

At one level, Bennett-Cardy’s sullen teen remarks to Silky that feminism clearly hasn’t made it to the Faraway Tree. “I think it’s responsible, what Simon and the creative team have done,” says Garfield. “I mean, the other option is to stay true to outdated ideas.

“I’m going to speak for Enid Blyton now,” he chuckles. “I’m sure if Enid Blyton was alive now, her great-great-grandchildren would say to her, ‘Well, this has changed, and there’s more awakedness to this not being very kind, and this being exclusionary, and this being othering, and this being not acceptable to treat other human beings in this way. And I would hope that she would be, like, ‘Yeah. Fair enough.’”

There is, he provides, a “purity and a sweetness in the essence” of Blyton’s writing, regardless of its objectionable flaws. “And I think what Simon’s done, very elegantly, is really focus on growing and watering that essence.”

“It’s more of a question for Simon Farnaby, to be honest,” says Foy. “But, you know, as actors, me and Andrew have the responsibility of choosing to be part of things that we think have integrity and a moral compass. And sometimes, you’re going to get that wrong. But I certainly think that The Magic Faraway Tree’s heart is in the right place.”

It’s exhausting to disagree that the movie is hitting all the proper notes. And its paean to the virtues of technology-free atavism feels notably well timed. “I do think it’s a bit of a mission statement,” says Garfield, “for a more nature-based future. I feel like more parents and young people are waking up to think, ‘Oh, something’s really off here. I need to go and sit under a tree for a bit.’ I think that instinct is very alive in most people, whether conscious or not. It just takes a little more work now, because we’ve been captured.” He begins laughing at his personal phrasing. “Captured and imprisoned! Our attention has been hijacked and held to ransom.”

Watching Garfield and Foy work together with one another, as two inimitably British actors who each broke into Hollywood at an identical time, there’s a actual sense of kinship – that these are friends within the richest sense of the phrase. “I’m very proud to be part of the community of actors and creators in the UK,” says Foy. “I think that there’s an integrity and a community that is forged here, which is really, really, really special.

“I think people think of ‘Hollywood’, in inverted commas, as a place,” she continues. “And if you’re making films, you’re just in a series of different places with a series of different people. And hopefully, throughout mine and Andrew’s careers, we’re going to keep interweaving, and spending time with each other.”

Acting, she says, is a uncommon occupation wherein folks’s worlds can collide repeatedly, generally over the course of a lifetime. “You know those groups of actors you hear of, like the Dames, who are in and out of each other’s lives for years in a professional capacity? There’s a love there, and a feeling of growth, watching someone go through life – not just as an actor, but also as a human being. And it’s a very unique experience, I think, to have that within work.”

Foy smiles once more. Garfield smiles once more. Maybe the subsequent time their paths cross, it’ll be again in additional lachrymose circumstances – I reckon they’d be a superb match for a contemporary, even sadder reboot of Marley and Me. But for now, the grass is inexperienced. The solar is out. And these two actors are basking in it.

‘The Magic Faraway Tree’ is in cinemas from 27 March