Get Ready to Fall in Love With Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield in ‘We Live in Time’

After directing the 2015 film Brooklyn and the BBC series Life After Life, director John Crowley wasn’t looking to do something “nakedly emotional” for a while. But when he got his hands on Nick Payne’s script for the romantic drama We Live in Time, he knew he couldn’t resist.

The story is about two relatively normal people living in London: an ambitious chef named Almut and a Weetabix employee named Tobias. They meet by accident—literally, Almut hits Tobias with her car—and end up falling in love and building a family together. The story is made extraordinary by the way it’s told: It captures the swirly, sweet magic of falling in love, then explores what happens when that love story is cut short.

Crowley was drawn in by the way the film unfolds. Instead of telling the story chronologically, We Live in Time—which will have its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on September 6 and will be released in theaters by A24 on October 11—weaves together several different time periods, jumping around the couple’s relationship. “The number of facets that were revealed of that relationship—good, bad, and indifferent—almost made it feel like a Cubist painting to me,” says Crowley. “It was like seeing something from lots of different perspectives simultaneously, rather than it being a great, big sweeping narrative.”

But the film does feel sweeping because of the way it crescendos, all the little building blocks of Almut and Tobias’s relationship coming together over time. A juggling act of tone, We Live in Time is funny, sweet, sad—and yes, nakedly emotional. But a romantic drama like this only works if its central actors have the sort of chemistry that sparks so brightly you can almost feel the heat. Lucky for us, Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh have their full talents on display in the film, delivering vastly charming and vulnerable performances. As they fall in love onscreen, you can’t help but do the same.

Pugh was actually thinking back to some of those classic, charming romance films—like Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral, About Time, and Love Actually—when she first read the script for We Live in Time. Like Crowley, she just couldn’t resist the project. “Especially as Brits, we grow up with the quirkiest and most beautiful of love stories. And I think it’s been a long time since we’ve had one of those,” she says. “When I read it, I just fell in love with the idea of getting to be in one of those movies that will matter to a lot of people, and will live for a long time. And it’s about the simplest of things, which is that we are here, I personally believe, for one reason only: to love and be loved.”

Crowley and Garfield had been wanting to work together again ever since they made the 2007 British drama Boy A, Garfield’s film debut. But unlike that dark story, in which Garfield played a young man reentering society after serving 14 years in a juvenile prison, We Live in Time would allow Garfield to show off his comedic abilities along with his dramatic chops. “He’s very funny, and to be able to show both sides of his gifts in one part—the extreme emotionality and his physical comedy—was too much to resist,” says Crowley.

When Crowley approached Garfield about the script, the actor was on a sabbatical and hadn’t been working for about a year. Because he was in such a reflective place himself, the script felt like exactly what he was looking for. Plus, it stood in stark contrast to his most recent work playing the ambitious creative genius Jonathan Larson in the musical Tick, Tick…Boom! “Of course with similar themes of a ticking clock and a burgeoning awareness of the sacredness and the shortness of our lives, but it was through a very, very different lens,” Garfield says. “And it was quite interesting to me on a performance-challenge level to be like, okay, how do I play a guy who reads very ordinary and is comfortable in his ordinariness, having played someone who’s so obsessed with being extraordinary and genius?”

With Garfield signed on, the next challenge was to find his costar. Crowley immediately thought of Pugh. “I never met her, but I’ve been a huge fan of her work, and very struck by her ability to portray a degree of strength and robustness,” he says. “I thought if she could take that and get towards the vulnerability that’s needed towards the end of the story, that could be really rich and interesting.”

But for a while, it looked like Pugh would not be available because she had to shoot the Marvel movie Thunderbolts. Then, by some miracle, the schedule shifted, and she had a small window of time open up. Her agent gave her the script. “I think for a long time, I’ve wanted to find something that is not necessarily as hardened or as powerful as my other characters,” says Pugh, known for her work in Midsommar, Little Women, Oppenheimer, and Dune: Part Two. “I think this came at the right time in my life. I got to play a very, very normal woman who is talented in her own ways. The story is about the powerful love, and the powerful connection, between two people.”

Garfield and Pugh had never collaborated before, but they did present an award together at the Oscars in 2023—setting the internet afire with their instant chemistry. Crowley first witnessed the spark between the two actors during their week of rehearsals. “There were a few moments in scenes, just throwaway moments, where you would see flashes of their brilliance and dazzle. I would go, ‘Put that away. Let’s not do that again until we’ve got a camera running on it,’” he says. “[It’s like] watching two extraordinary tennis players on center court in Wimbledon, and suddenly one of them cannot but hit the ball really hard, and the other one just bangs it back.”

Though the actors shared a mutual respect, they knew the film would hinge entirely on their chemistry. “It was scary because it was like, well, we don’t know each other, and this is high-stakes because…we have to find a way to express the depths of universal love and loss together,” says Garfield.

But soon enough, it became clear that the chemistry was working. The pair soon gelled into a rhythm, feeling comfortable enough to dig into the deep emotional work of the movie. “I felt very grown-up,” says Pugh. “I felt like I was coming at it in a different way, and I had someone who could hold me and protect me in the same way that I was holding Andrew and protecting him. And it was a very, very fluid language between the two of us, and that was just a very powerful thing to create with someone.”

Though there are plenty of moments of levity in the film, the project is a heavy lift after Almut is diagnosed with cancer and begins treatment. Pugh shaved her head for the film, which caught the attention of fans and the media when she walked the Met Gala carpet with her new look. “I think there was this weird rumor on the internet saying that I did it to take back my identity, which is something I’ve never said in my entire life,” she says. During her early conversations with Crowley, he told her that they could look at wigs or other options short of full head-shaving. “I just stopped him mid-sentence and I was like, ‘John, no one can play a character like this in a movie like this and not do the thing that is needed to be done,’” she says. “And if you don’t want to do it, I believe that you shouldn’t be doing a story like this.”

The cancer and grief storylines hit especially close for Garfield, whose mother died of pancreatic cancer in 2019. But making a story so close to home didn’t scare him off. Instead, Garfield explains his approach by quoting a line from Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese”: “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” We Live in Time allowed him to explore his own grief, and may help others do the same. “There’s a communing in the spirit of loss, in the shared experience of loss and love and the cost of loving and being fully alive,” he says. “So I hope that we can all bond in the courage to do that.”