Andrew Garfield only told 3 people about his 'Spider-Man: No Way Home' return. So, who knew?

Marvel stars are used to dodging questions from the press about plot details of their upcoming films that they can't spill, but with Spider-Man: No Way Home the secret-keeping seemed to reach a level it never had before. Though there were plenty of spoilers worth keeping under wraps, many fans and interviewers alike were often only interested in one question: Would former Spider-Men Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield join Tom Holland for a multiversal team-up on the big screen? 

For Garfield, who spent much of the past year promoting other films like The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Tick, Tick...Boom!, it was a lot of questions he couldn't answer... or at least couldn't answer truthfully. Now that the film's been out for well over a month, Garfield has freely admitted that he spent interview after interview lying to everywhere, turning it into a game to help justify the constant poker face he had to keep on junkets and talk shows.

In recent days, Garfield's admitted that he lied even to close friends, like his ex-partner and co-star Emma Stone, about his involvement in No Way Home. 

All of which begs the question: Who exactly did Andrew Garfield tell that he was coming back as Spider-Man?

On The Ellen DeGeneres Show this week, Garfield revealed that, apart from necessary people like his agent, he only revealed that he would be Spider-Man one more time to his immediate family. 

"My dad, my brother, and my mother… just kind of us. It was fun to keep it a secret," Garfield said. "It felt like I was organizing a surprise birthday party for a bunch of people who I knew would appreciate it."

But of course, in the current media landscape, it was about more than just keeping a secret. Though Maguire was in the public eye a bit less than his co-stars, both Garfield and Holland had to spend the better part of two years not just keeping their team-up quiet, but flat-out lying about it to interviewers and fans who simply wouldn't stop asking the question. Since refusing to answer the question, or saying something like "Watch the movie and see," could be viewed as a confirmation by refusing to deny it, both stars had to simply lie repeatedly, to the point that Garfield had to call leaked photos of his appearance on set "a Photoshop" in the middle of an interview on The Tonight Show as fans shouted that he was lying. 

Despite all of it, though, in hindsight Garfield doesn't seem to have minded preserving the secret all that much. 

"I lied to people for a good two years and I lied to the internet for two years, and it felt great," he joked with DeGeneres. 

Now the secret's out. Let's just hope there's not some other Amazing Spider-Man revival in the cards that Garfield will have to lie about for two more years.