Andrew Garfield even lied to Emma Stone about his super-secret 'Spider-Man: No Way Home' role

Even if you're an Oscar-winner and one of the most sought-after actors in Hollywood, you still won't be made privy to top-secret Marvel spoilers. Appearing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Andrew Garfield admitted to host Josh Horowitz that he was forced to lie to Emma Stone (his co-star in The Amazing Spider-Man films) about his crowd-pleasing appearance in No Way Home (now playing).

"Emma kept on texting me and she was like, 'Are you in this new Spider-Man film?'" the actor recalled with a sadistic grin. "And I was like, 'I don't know what you're talking about.' She was like, 'Shut up, just tell me.' I kept it going even with her, it was hilarious ... And then she saw it and she was like, 'You're a jerk.'"

Garfield admirably kept the secret for half a year, lying through his teeth during every single interview that came his way prior to the blockbuster's theatrical release in December. Last week, we learned that he simply treated the whole thing like a high-stakes round of Werewolf (a game in which a person is chosen to be a "killer" and must pick off the other players — all while avoiding detection).

“It was like this massive game of Werewolf that I was playing with journalists and with people guessing, and it was very fun,” he said. “There were moments where I was like, ‘God, I hate lying.’ I don’t like to lie and I’m not a good liar, but I kept framing it as a game. And I kept imagining myself purely as a fan of that character, which is not hard to do ... It’s been a rare experience to play that mass game of Werewolf with every single Spider-Man fan in the world."

Stone — who took home an Academy Award in 2017 for her performance in La La Land — played Peter Parker's love interest, Gwen Stacy, in Marc Webb's Amazing Spider-Man duology. Gwen perished in the second film after a battle with Dane DeHaan's Green Goblin (a direct nod to the character's untimely death in a famous comic book storyline from 1973 1973). Peter's terrible guilt over not being able to save his girlfriend is slightly alleviated in the climax of No Way Home, which allows for Garfield's hero to finally correct that one fatal mistake in his past by saving Zendaya's MJ from a similar fate.

"My Spider-Man got to save his younger brother’s romantic relationship, potentially. And to heal the most traumatic moment of his own life through doing it for his younger brother," Garfield remarked during an interview with Variety. "Making sure that he didn’t have the same fate, there’s something cosmically beautiful about that. It meant getting a second chance at saving Gwen. You know, the spirit that Zendaya brings to MJ is so heartfelt and pure and loving, and Emma brought that similar unique spirit to Gwen."

It's not particularly clear if Stone and Kirsten Dunst (who played the Mary-Jane in the Tobey Maguire universe) were ever considered to show up in No Way Home as well. That said, co-screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers did admit that previous drafts of the script did include even more cameos that were ultimately scrapped. “We went down different roads with different characters that just didn’t fit,” McKenna explained to Variety. “We can’t get into the details of that because it might be the kind of thing where they’ll find a way to explore those ideas. So I’d hate to spoil anything, because I think we had a lot of fun.”

Spider-Man: No Way Home is currently playing in theaters everywhere. The film remained at the very top of the box office for the past month since it opened on Dec. 17. It was finally unseated this weekend by the fifth Scream movie. Nevertheless, No Way Home continues to defy all pandemic logic with a global haul of $1.625 billion, making it the eighth highest-grossing release in history.