Andrew Garfield is looking back on one of his first breakout roles in a movie, 2010’s The Social Network, and reminiscing on how it has changed his perspective on social media in general for the worse.
Hailed by many critics as one of the very best films of the decade, The Social Network recounts the rise of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, and the friends and enemies he makes along the way, including co-founder Eduardo Saverin, played by Garfield.
The film was based on the 2009 non-fiction book by Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires. However, the movie adaptation takes some notable liberties with the factual recounting of events, such as the over-the-top partying scenes, making it more of a dramatization for entertainment’s sake than a documentary account.
Regardless of some of the exaggerated drama that went down in the film, Facebook and other social media sites have had their fair share of controversies in the real world since then.
Both Garfield and fellow The Social Network co-star Dakota Johnson, who plays Amelia Ritter in the movie, discussed their thoughts on the topic in a recent Vanity Fair interview.
“I don’t think they’ve necessarily helped people, humanity,” Johnson said of social media technology. She then leveled the question back at Garfield, saying, “Do you think that social media is mostly good or mostly bad?”
In his response, Garfield said, “I don’t know. I lean towards get rid of it.”
“I think a lot of people saw The Social Dilemma, that great Netflix documentary, which was saying everything that we already know, but I think in a very accessible way,” he added. “I think you can find the dysfunction that gets created from these technologies, I think it’s all the rotten head of the fish.”
Garfield went on to say he thinks Zuckerberg is “obviously a man that has struggled to connect with people in an emotionally intelligent, deep way” and that “there’s this terrible superficial connection that’s happening that is limiting how we can actually relate,” due to technology created by him and others.
You can catch Andrew Garfield in the Netflix film tick, tick…BOOM! and Dakota Johnson in the Netflix film The Lost Daughter.