How'd Andrew Garfield keep his 'Spider-Man: No Way Home' secrets? He just turned it into a game.

Now that Andrew Garfield can finally speak the truth about his epic appearance in Spider-Man: No Way Home, the actor has stated that he feels no qualms about lying to the public for nearly a year. Speaking with The Wrap about his turn as the late Jonathan Larson in Netflix's tick, tick...BOOM!, Garfield described the experience as "rather stressful, but also weirdly enjoyable" and "thrilling."

He went on to liken the constant flow of Marvel-related denials to a popular party game known as Werewolf (sometimes called Mafia) in which a single player must pick off other players while trying to avoid suspicion and detection from the rest of the group.

“It was like this massive game of Werewolf that I was playing with journalists and with people guessing, and it was very fun,” Garfield admitted, echoing comments he made in May 2021. “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."

In the end, he decided it was better to withhold the truth than to spoil something that would be a real cinematic treat for fans who had eagerly waited months for No Way Home's theatrical debut last month. Besides, he was probably bound up in legal NDAs tighter than Peter Parker's homemade webbing.

"I placed myself in that position of, 'Well, what would I want to know? Would I want to be toyed with? Would I want to be lied to? Would I want to be kept on my toes guessing? Would I want to discover it when I went to the theater? Would I want to be guessing, guessing, guessing?'" he continued. "I would want the actor to do an incredibly good job at convincing me he wasn’t in it. And then I would want to lose my mind in the theater when my instinct was proven right. That’s what I would want."

Garfield shot down the rumors several times, going so far as to claim that a leaked photo of him on the No Way Home set (it turned out to be from the Statue of Liberty climax) was a work of Photoshop.

Answering internet question for a GQ video, he tried to squash the whispers once and for all: "Listen, at this point...I'm done," We'll all find out when the movie comes out and we'll either be very disappointed or we'll be very happy or someone will say, 'I told you so.' And then another person will say, 'But I told you so.' We'll all find, I'm sorry in advance."

Things got to the point where many of us started to lose hope in seeing the return of Spider-Men from other universes. Luckily, all of the speculation — from Matt Murdock's introduction into the mainstream MCU to the involvement of Garfield and Tobey Maguire turned out to be 100 percent true. Still, the leaks were pretty disheartening after so much effort to keep all the surprises on lock.

“I worked so hard to keep it secret that I was in Atlanta shooting,” Garfield concluded. “All these leaks were happening, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, guys, what the hell is going on? I’m working so hard here to stay secret, and then here’s an image of me with Tobey!’ And they’re like, ‘No, no, we’re gonna keep it quiet.’ ‘OK, I’ll keep denying it.' I was happy to do it, but it was a lot of work on everyone’s part. It obviously gave people a big thrill in the theater, and what more do you want from a theater experience than a thrill?"

Spider-Man: No Way Home is now playing in theaters everywhere. Over the weekend, the film became the eighth-highest grossing movie of all time (it's now sandwiched between Jon Favreau's photorealistic remake of The Lion King and 2012's The Avengers). 

tick, tick...BOOM! is now streaming on Netflix.