Here's How Andrew Garfield Landed His Spider-Man Role

Cheeseburgers might not be the healthiest food around, but sometimes they can get you exactly what you want.

When Spider-Man 3 was released in theaters in 2007, it went on to gross over $890 million at the worldwide box office – which all but assured another film in the superhero film series. However, trilogy director Sam Raimi decided to leave the project in early 2010, as he "hated" the script and felt he couldn't complete the film in time to hit Sony's scheduled May 11, 2011 release date. 

With the man who brought the lucrative franchise to life ditching the project, Sony decided to completely reboot the web-slinger and hired (500) Days of Summer filmmaker Marc Webb to bring a new direction for the character in 2012's The Amazing Spider-Man. Interestingly enough, Webb has stated that eventual star Andrew Garfield ended up clinching the role all because of one bizarre thing: a cheeseburger.

Speaking with Yahoo Movies in June 2012, Webb let it slip that Garfield ended up booking the role amongst heavy competition due to Garfield's ability to eat a cheeseburger convincingly. 

"We were doing a scene that's not in the movie, where he was eating a cheeseburger and telling Gwen to like calm down or to — trying to put her at ease, while he is eating food," the director said.  "And the way he ate this food — it was such a dumb task — such a dumb independent activity that you give to an actor to do, and he did it... and I felt like there's something in the way he embodied and committed to that really tiny minutia — I just hadn't seen before. I can't explain exactly what I felt like it worked, but that was it." 

It's pretty incredible that eating a cheeseburger got Garfield the starring role in a billion-dollar franchise, especially when you consider the names that were also auditioning for the role at the time. Initial reports said the final casting pool included then-up-and-coming actors like Fantastic Four's Jamie Bell, Solo's Alden Ehrenreich, Fear the Walking Dead's Frank Dillane, and The Hunger Games' Josh Hutcherson. Sony's shortlist eventually went on to become even more star-studded, as Avengers: Age of Ultron's Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Star Trek's Anton Yelchin both auditioned for the role. 

Of course, Garfield's time as the wall-crawler was short-lived, as Sony abandoned the Amazing Spider-Man franchise in favor of an MCU-backed reboot starring Tom Holland, which has also began going through its own production turbulence. 

Garfield has since moved on — starring in numerous, smaller films that have reached critical acclaim, like Hacksaw Ridge and Silence. But Garfield took his time as Spider-Man very seriously. When speaking to The Guardian in 2016, he said, "This is exquisite and terrifying and incredible. I have been given the responsibility of reaching my hand out from the big screen and putting it on [young boys'] shoulders. That is a gift for me and a big burden to carry. And I'm so up for it."

It's clear that being fired from the series was hard Garfield: "What I'll proudly say is that I didn't compromise who I was, I was only ever myself. And that might have been difficult for some people." And while his career has clearly continued without a hitch in the years since his time in big-screen tights, the man surely has to wonder — what if he wasn't so dang good at eating a cheeseburger?