Garfield, Pugh charm Toronto in new romance We Live in Time

Oscar nominees Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh are both hard-pressed to explain exactly how on-screen chemistry is created, but they have oodles of it in their new tearjerker romance We Live in Time, which debuted at the Toronto film festival.

The movie tells the story of Michelin-starred chef Almut (Pugh) and Tobias (Garfield), an employee of cereal company Weetabix, who meet-cute in perhaps the most awkward way possible — she hits him with her car.

Director John Crowley takes the audience on an intimate journey of their love story, from dating and steamy sex to building a family to confronting cancer, through snapshots of their existence — all presented out of order. 

For Pugh, that process allowed the two actors to learn more about their characters and each other as the shoot went on. “It was such a magical experience,” the 28-year-old British actress told AFP on Saturday, not long after the movie’s warmly received premiere late Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

“We’ve been trying to talk about what chemistry is and where it comes from, and ultimately, we don’t know other than the fact that we both were willing to jump together, and that’s probably why it feels so mad and raw.”

Indeed, there are brutal moments of anger between the couple, but also paralyzing sadness and, before that, the wild thrill of having a child — an emergency delivery in a gas station bathroom.

“I’m so happy that I did it and I got to do it with Florence,” Garfield said. “I don’t think it was meant to be with anyone else,” added the 41-year-old, who was taking a break when he received Nick Payne’s script, and quickly jumped at the chance to work with Crowley, who had directed him in “Boy A” (2007).

The British-American actor said Saturday the film was “like a sacred healing ritual,” allowing him to handle “certain losses that I experienced, and with certain longings that I was experiencing.”

For Crowley, Payne’s nonlinear structure offered a “playful invitation to the audience to begin putting this together.”

He told AFP that the shoot was of course out of order, though the crew did not want Garfield and Pugh “schizophrenically jumping too far” between time periods on any given day.

On the few days with scenes in three time periods, “that was a real head-wrecker for them,” he said.

“It was a very interesting technical and emotional exercise.”

After working on last year’s huge hit “Oppenheimer” and sci-fi epic “Dune 2,” Pugh said she was thrilled with the genre shift for “We Live in Time,” which will open in limited release in the United States on October 11.

“I’ve been wanting to do a love story for a while,” she told AFP.

Once her character Almut is diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she struggles to balance her limited time left between her family and her professional goals.

“The things that she’s going through in the story are the things I see in my friends, in my sisters and my mum, in myself now,” Pugh said, referring to the hectic juggling of career, love, motherhood and health.

When asked about the 13-year age difference between the actors, Crowley said it quickly became irrelevant because of the pair’s palpable connection.

“Florence is an old soul,” the director said. “She carries more heft on her and in a way, Andrew, who’s also an old soul, carries a kind of boyishness — he always has.”

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