Watch Andrew Garfield flirt his way through grief

We're all blushing at the actor’s appearance on 'Chicken Shop Date,' where he teaches a master class on the erotic exuberance of life after loss.

"I’ll write something light this week,” I thought when I contemplated a short newsletter about a viral video that I had fun watching a few days ago of actor Andrew Garfield being interviewed by the comedian Amelia Dimoldenberg on her YouTube show “Chicken Shop Date.” 

The idea behind the video is that Dimoldenberg hosts "dates" with musicians, comedians, actors, etc at chicken shops around the UK. It’s a playful twist on the late night talk show format.  Recent guests have included Shania Twain, Cher, Ryan Reynolds, and the Jonas Brothers. 

But this most recent video with Garfield stands out from all the others because it appears to feature two people experiencing actual butterflies-in-the-stomach chemistry. This isn’t exactly a meet cute, but it’s pretty close. You can feel their heart rates speed up, the flush rise in their cheeks. They stumble on their words and drop hints about what they might be.

It’s a very meta conversation about what is happening. Either an expert performance from two gifted actors who know how to put on a show or the sheer magic that happens when two people realize that their whole life might be changing in front of their eyes. 

Garfield is on a media tour for his new film, “We Live in Time,” a movie coming out this month about a couple who has to confront death when one of them gets a terminal cancer diagnosis. 

Andrew Garfield and his mom. Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic

As part of Garfield’s promo for the film, he’s doing lots of interviews and appearances, and almost all of them become an opportunity for him to talk about grief. His mom died in 2019 of pancreatic cancer, and he has spoken tearfully and openly about how this loss has shaped his personal and professional life. 

"It’s actually kind of okay to miss somebody,” he tearfully tells his furry friend Elmo in another viral clip I saw on social media this week. 

But that’s not the Andrew Garfield we see in this video. 

This is Andrew Garfield, the flirt. The bachelor. The guy looking for a girl who can make him laugh and realizing maybe he just found her. (I admittedly know very little about either of them, but stick with me here.)

It’s the precise kind of erotic tension that Esther Perel writes about in her 2006 book “Mating In Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence,” in which she explores the tension between the need for familiarity and mystery in romantic relationships. Freedom and security, novelty and predictability. 

“Modernity has reduced eroticism to sex. In the mystical sense, eroticism is been about aliveness,” she said in a recent interview with Miranda July. “Sex is the basic instinct, but eroticism is what gives us vibrancy, vitality, curiosity, playfulness.” 

It’s a duality, like the others that Perel writes about, that keeps the world spinning.

That’s why I couldn’t stop thinking about this video. There’s so much alive-ness in it, and I can think of nothing that makes one feel alive more than the presence of death.

This is grief, the mixing of the bitter and the sweet that comes as we make meaning of our lives in the wake of profound, soul-shaping loss.

Perel’s career is rooted in the aliveness that comes from grief. She grew up in a Belgian community where everyone had lost family members and friends in the Holocaust, and yet they found ways to laugh and dance and marvel at the world, even in their devastation.