- Andrew Garfield, Tobey Maguire, and Tom Holland recreate a famous meme in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”
- On the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast, Garfield said he suggested how to insert the pointing Spidey meme into the film.
- The moment was originally different with Garfield delivering a sardonic line, which didn’t feel right to him.
One of the best moments of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” occurred when Andrew Garfield, Tobey Maguire, and Tom Holland’s trio of Spider-Men recreated the popular Spider-Man pointing meme in Peter’s (Holland) high school lab.
It turns out, the moment was the brainchild of none other than Garfield himself.
“We were trying to figure out the pointing thing,” Garfield told Josh Horowitz on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast of it taking a while for them to solve where that moment could fit into the sequel naturally.
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“I remember having a lightning bolt… and then running into set and telling [director] Jon [Watts], ‘I got it. I got it. I got it!'” Garfield said, excitedly. “There’s this moment where Jacob’s like, ‘Hey Peter,’ and we all go, ‘Yeah?'”
Garfield said, in the script, that was originally about the extent of how that moment was supposed to play out, with his character saying a line that felt out of place.
“We all go, ‘Yeah,’ and then I think in the script it was like, my Peter says, ‘This isn’t gonna get old at all,’ something kind of sardonic,” Garfield said, acknowledging that the line from his character didn’t feel right and would have undercut the moment, which is supposed to feel lighter.
“We were thinking I could say, ‘Oh, this is adorable. We’re so adorable,'” Garfield said of them workshopping the moment until he offered up a version of the live-action meme. “But then I was like — Oh, no. This is the moment where we get to go, ‘Oh, did you mean me? Or did you mean the —”
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“And Jon was like, ‘That’s it. That’s it. Yeah. Done,'” Garfield said. “I’m so happy that that worked.”
If you’re not familiar, the meme is a reference to a scene from the animated ’60s “Spider-Man” cartoon where a villain pretends to be the web-slinger. When the two come face to face, they point at each other.
In “No Way Home,” the scene is subtly recreated. As Ned (Jacob Batalon) calls out to Peter, all three Peters respond. Realizing they all share the same name, they point to one another as they try and figure out who Ned wants to speak with in the moment.
On the podcast, Garfield noted the pointing meme occurs in one other moment late in the film, which some fans picked up on immediately after the film’s release.
“It kind of happened naturally while we were on that scaffolding,” Garfield said referencing a moment where the trio decide to call themselves Peter 1, Peter 2, and Peter 3.
In the “No Way Home” script, which Deadline released online here, the meme is only referenced during the lab scene.