Andrew Garfield says Tick Tick Boom helped him deal with mother’s death

Andrew Garfield’s recent appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert There was a lot to sing and stories about Lin Manuel Miranda. It is only natural that an actor would promote his new musical. However, the conversations around tick, tick… BOOM!, This musical biography is built around Jonathan Larson’s work. MietenThen, it turned to pain.

It’s not exactly a surprising turn, given both the subject matter and the people having the conversation. Larson, who was 35 years old and had a heart condition that could be treated, died tragically on the morning of Mieten’s first Off-Broadway preview performance. Part of Garfield’s story is death. He tragically lost his mother in 2019 and this was the connection. But it’s a subject he’s happy to bring up, and starting around 4:19 in the video above, he tells Colbert why.

“I love talking about this,” Garfield says with a sad smile. He defines grief as “the unexpressed love” we feel for a person, even a person who was well-aware of being loved every day. “We never get enough time with each, right? It doesn’t matter how old someone is, whether they live to be 60 or 15, or 99. So I hope this grief stays with me, because it’s all the unexpressed love that I didn’t get to tell her. She heard it every day. We all told her every day.”

It’s truly moving sentiment. Colbert, a consummate host lets Garfield deal with his grief. Colbert knows firsthand what it is like to use art as a way of processing grief. Colbert wrote a GQ essay in 2015 about the plane accident that claimed his father’s and brothers’ lives when he was ten years old. Doing theater in college, Colbert described “sharing my pain with everyone around me,” saying that acting was “therapy as much as it was anything.”

It’s not that art can lessen the grief, both Garfield and Colbert seem to feel. It can make it easier to understand the unimaginable.