Superstar director Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt loves to provoke.
The film’s central storyline centers around the accusation that a college professor, Andrew Garfield’s Hank, sexually assaulted a student named Maggie (Ayo Edibiri). The allegation threatens to undo the very fabric of the department, and the university at large.
From its Woody Allen-style opening credits to its #MeToo plotline, it’s practically designed to get people talking. But perhaps its most interesting—and successful—element is how the film upends our expectations of Andrew Garfield as a star and as an actor.
It’s a shocking performance, and an extremely impressive one. You’ve never seen Garfield like this before.
To understand why After the Hunt is such a transformative role for Garfield, you first need to understand his star persona.
Over the last 15 years, Garfield has built a career of characters that are easy to root for. His most well-known role is the Amazing Spider-Man movies as the titular webslinger, allowing him to shine as the ultimate hero. In films like Never Let Me Go, Breathe, and We Live in Time, he bolstered himself as a bona fide romantic lead.
His two Oscar nominations stem from playing characters with unshakable values in challenging circumstances: A theater kid desperate to make it big on Broadway in tick, tick…BOOM! And a pacifist forced into war in Hacksaw Ridge. Garfield shines when playing guys you can’t help but root for.
As if his string of playing effortlessly lovable characters wasn’t enough, Garfield has expressed tremendous vulnerability in interviews. In a 2022 interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, he spoke with raw emotion and candor about losing his mother and the grief he experiences.
Last October, he appeared on Sesame Street in a segment with Elmo to talk more about his mother, helping to explain grief to children, and that it’s healthy to feel sad about loss, and that talking about it is vital. While it’s common to see actors be emotional when performing, it’s extremely rare for someone of Garfield’s status to be so honest about their emotions—and his earnestness with such a difficult subject is a big reason why so many adore him.
Garfield has showcased far more than heartbreak outside of his work, sparking up an undeniably playful chemistry with viral YouTube interviewer Amelia Dimoldenberg, who hosts the Chicken Shop Date series.
Dimoldenberg first encountered Garfield on the red carpet at the 2022 GQ Man of the Year awards and met again at the Golden Globes before Garfield finally was on the Chicken Shop Date, in a video that scored more views than similar episodes with superstars like Billie Eilish and Jennifer Lawrence. The video showcases Garfield’s irrepressible charm; he’s playful, flirtatious, and downright adorable.
It solidifies what you expect from his film characters: Garfield might be the loveliest guy you could meet. (The fact that he’s devastatingly handsome doesn’t hurt either.)
But After the Hunt unravels everything we’ve come to expect from Andrew Garfield.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
Garfield’s Hank is an a–hole. The man doesn’t have a redeemable bone in his body. When Hank is first introduced at a party hosted by philosophy professor Alma (Julia Roberts) and her husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), he’s wearing a crisp black blazer, white shirt, and jeans. He looks friendly enough, smile beaming.
After a few moments of peace, he digs into Maggie. “All your generation, you’re scared of saying the wrong thing,” says Hank unprompted. “When did offending someone become the preeminent cardinal sin?” Garfield delivers the lines with such annoyance, as if even having to address someone younger than him is a staggering waste of his time. Throughout the scene, Garfield presents Hank as a walking red flag, a guy overflowing in privilege and ego.
That night, something happens between Maggie and Hank. The film doesn’t show us what happens after Hank offers to walk Maggie home, but it clearly affected Maggie, who doesn’t come to class the next day. That evening, she tells Alma, with whom she works closely and trusts, that Hank came up to her apartment and crossed a line, and wouldn’t stop when she said no. Alma is horrified: She’s extremely close friends with Hank and doesn’t know what to do.
Maggie makes her complaint to the university official, and they act swiftly, firing Hank. But Hank doesn’t go down without a fight, disrupting one of Alma’s classes, ranting and raving about his mistreatment and how Alma has betrayed him, while the students look on in horror.
Here, Garfield turns Hank into a seething ball of rage and fury, complete with flared nostrils, eyes darting erratically, and sweat beading down his forehead. He doubles (or perhaps triples) down on the rhetoric he spouted at the party, screaming at the top of his lungs at Alma’s students (including Maggie) that they’re a bunch of “privileged, coddled hypocrites” before storming out of Yale for good.
His anger isn’t that of someone innocent, distraught that their life is unraveling. It feels more like someone incensed that they’ve finally been caught; their privilege can no longer protect them.
Though After the Hunt does not reveal what actually happened between Maggie and Hank, Hank’s final scene with Alma seems to confirm Maggie wasn’t lying. Alma finds Hank hiding in her second apartment, where she sometimes goes to work. He’s a shell of his former self—angrier than ever, and completely lost. He and Alma start to kiss, which she wants to stop. But Hank presses on and gets physically aggressive with her, to the point she needs to use all her might to push Hank off her. Ashamed and revealed as the monster he’s pretended he isn’t, Hank slinks out of Alma’s apartment, never to be seen again.
The kind, sensitive, and heartwarming Garfield we’ve come to know is nowhere to be found in After the Hunt, as Hank turns everything we know about Garfield as an actor on its head. After a lifetime of rooting for Garfield’s characters, it feels awfully good to root against one.
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