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Andrew Garfield Felt ‘Called’ to Crucifixed Story ‘Uprising’

Andrew Garfield Felt ‘Called’ to Crucifixed Story ‘Uprising’

Last updated on: September 9, 2026 at 11:38 pm by DeWayne Hamby

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Andrew Garfield Felt ‘Called’ to Crucifixed Story ‘Uprising’ 2026-09-09T23:38:26-04:00 DeWayne Hamby

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My articles frequently circle the faith and spirituality side of entertainment, so “The Uprising,” the new film from Paul Greengrass starring Andrew Garfield, landed in a distinct way. The historical drama about England’s 1381 Peasants’ Revolt is not marketed as a “faith film.” But sitting with Greengrass and Garfield in an interview prior to its release, it was hard not to hear a spiritual story underneath the revolt.

Garfield plays the Ploughman, a farmer who has already lost almost everything from the scourge of the Black Death. When tax collections turn brutal, his stand becomes a movement that marches toward London and forces a young King Richard II into the open. Greengrass (“The Bourne Identity,” “Captain Phillips”) directs it in the grounded, urgent style he’s known for. What stayed with me was not the scale. It was the reason they said the uprising happened.

I asked Greengrass whether the idea that one person prompting for justice can spark a whole movement still feels timely.

“I would say it’s both timeless and timely,” he said.

He set the film 600 years ago among ordinary people who believed the world was “deeply unfair and rigged against them.” That rage, he said, came from a theological split they could not live with.

“Their belief was, and their understanding was, that God was the source of justice, but mankind was the source of injustice,” Greengrass said. “And so there was this profound disconnect that they couldn’t bridge.”

The Ploughman represented the everyman whose story is not frequently carried in history books. Greengrass wrote him to carry the film and demonstrate the abuse the commoners experienced. He pointed to the moment in the film when the Ploughman has had enough. “Things must change.” From there, Greengrass argued that the idea still holds, no matter where you sit.

“In the end, whichever God you worship, whatever your conception of God is, God ultimately has to mean justice and grace and goodness and our better selves,” he said. “We can all look at the world and see elements of the world that are plainly unjust that are caused by mankind.”

He was careful not to turn it into a political talking point. The disconnect, he said, is older than our news cycle — and still part of it.

“Yes, ‘The Uprising’ is an epic—it has armour and bows and great crowds and a young king on his throne,” Greengrass writes in press notes. “But underneath all of it is our own dangerous, dislocated world, consumed by anger toward the elite, with hope and democracy hanging in the balance. I don’t answer that for the audience. I’ve never believed that’s my job. I only want them to recognize the world when they see it, and to carry the question home.”

Read: Greengrass Inspires, Unites With an Everyday Hero in “News of the World”

Garfield has headlined films of deep spiritual significance before. “Silence” wrestled with questions about God and persecution, and “Hacksaw Ridge” dealt with conviction and determination. I told him it often seems like those roles stay with him after the cameras stop. What would he take from the Ploughman?

“It was a privilege to play this character,” he said. “I really, really wanted to do it. In a very, very deep and mysterious way, I felt very called to it.”

That word — called — is not one you always hear in a junket. He described the character’s arc as personal, almost like conversion.

“There’s something about the transformation that happens for him which feels very personal, and almost like a death and a rebirth,” Garfield said. “That he, in losing everything, kind of finds everything.”

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He added, “I feel like that’s a deeply crucifixed spiritual story, a self-sacrificing story that hopefully we’re all living in some way, day in, day out, an old self is dying for a new self to be born.”

The journey, he said, is “painful, deeply painful, and full of grief and loss” with “a deep connection to himself, to his fellow brothers and sisters, to the struggle for justice, to God.”

He called that belonging “a birthright of dignity, a birthright of justice . . . from God, from nature.”

“The Uprising,” directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Andrew Garfield and Jamie Bell, opens in U.S. theaters September 10 from Focus Features.

General Christian

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September 11, 2026 Review: 'The Uprising' Asks: 'Is There Not a Cause?'

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