Andrew Garfield: Every Biopic He’s Starred In, Ranked Worst to Best

For an actor with a relatively short filmography, Andrew Garfield has spent a lot of it playing real people. With his Sam Altman turn in Artificial arriving this December, it’s a good moment to rank the five times in movies that he has played a very real person.

He is also set to appear as Roy Horn in Wild Things for Apple TV, alongside Jude Law. We didn’t include his role in Silence, because Father Rodrigues is a composite invention rather than one historical figure. While he shot scenes as Francis Weston in The Other Boleyn Girl, he was cut during the final edit.

The ranking of his five roles weighs the quality of the film, how much the part asked of him, and how completely he vanished into the real person.

5 Robin Cavendish in Breathe (2017)

Andy Serkis picked a genuinely difficult story for his directorial debut. Robin Cavendish contracted polio in Kenya in 1958, at 28, and was told he had a few months left. He lived another three decades, campaigning for better mobility equipment for disabled people. When his son Jonathan produced a movie about him, it fell upon Andrew Garfield to play the role in Breathe.

He had a challenging time playing the character paralysed from the neck down for most of the runtime. He had only his face and voice to work with, and he wrung a lot out of both, earning a Golden Globe nomination. Despite his best efforts, the movie wraps its real story in a Hollywood romance, making it the weakest of his biopics.

4 Jim Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021)

As the title suggests, this was Jessica Chastain‘s film, and she won an Oscar for it. Garfield’s job was to be the ground beneath her. He commits to the role and disappears under prosthetics and padding to bring Jim Bakker’s figure to the screen in The Eyes of Tammy Faye.

He also worked on catching Bakker’s faintly nasal cadence and permanent anxious smile. The tricky bit was his arc. Bakker goes from earnest young preacher to the man at the centre of a multimillion-dollar PTL fraud. The movie never quite decides whether he’s a deliberate con artist or someone who fooled himself first. And that’s the reason why this role lands fourth.

3 Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network (2010)

The Social Network is easily the best film on this list, and the one that made Garfield a name. David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin handed him the only warm-blooded character in the whole thing. And he plays it with conviction. He is the friend who bankrolls Facebook, gets diluted to nothing, and finally loses it with a laptop.

The role lands third because the biography part is thin. This is Zuckerberg’s story, and people really didn’t know the real Eduardo Saverin back in 2010. More interestingly, Garfield never met him for the role. He delivers a superb performance, but it wasn’t an exact portrait of the person behind it.

2 Jonathan Larson in Tick, Tick… Boom! (2021)

The real Jonathan Larson died of an aortic dissection at 35, hours before his musical Rent began previews off-Broadway. Lin-Manuel Miranda finally made his feature film directorial debut by telling the story of Larson in Tick, Tick… Boom!, years before his death, when he was turning 30 with nothing to show and no idea what was coming.

Garfield couldn’t sing when he took the role. He trained for roughly a year, earning his Golden Globe win and second Oscar nomination for it. More than the voice, it’s the restlessness he gets right. He brings Larson’s jittering desperation of someone convinced the clock is beating him. It is second only because of how the movie takes a semi-autobiographical approach to the story.

1 Desmond Doss in Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

Mel Gibson‘s war epic gave Garfield his first Oscar nomination, and it remains the toughest thing he’s pulled off. Desmond Doss was a Seventh-day Adventist from Lynchburg, Virginia, who enlisted as a medic. He refused to touch a weapon and dragged 75 men off a ridge in Okinawa. He became the first conscientious objector awarded the Medal of Honor.

Garfield was essentially walking into the most challenging role of his career in Hacksaw Ridge. He had to get Doss’s unshakeable religious conviction right without being smug about it. He borrowed the real Doss’s mannerisms, including the drawl, the shy grin, and the polite stubbornness. He worked hard for it and saw the result, earning this movie the number one spot among his biopics.

Bonus: Andrew Garfield Plays Sam Altman in Artificial (2026)

Will Garfield beat his Hacksaw Ridge performance with his Sam Altman turn in Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial? That’s the question fans waiting for this movie want answered. The movie is written by Simon Rich and zeroes in on the five days in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Altman and then reinstated him.

Amazon MGM dropped the nearly finished film in mid-2026, before Neon picked it up. It premieres at the New York Film Festival on October 5 and opens in select theatres on Christmas Day.

Where would you rank Garfield’s best real-life role? Let us know in the comments below!