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"It&amp;#039;s fair to say that Andrew Garfield has inhabited the role of Spider-Man to an impressive extent. After he was first announced as the frontman for Marc Webb&amp;#039;s reboot, he appeared in character at Comic-Con to make a heartfelt speech about what the character meant to him, and made a return appearance in Hall H this year.  So don&amp;#039;t get us wrong: we are big fans of Garfield as Spidey. But it&amp;#039;s been more than two years since he had another film out, and there&amp;#039;s nothing but The Amazing Spider-Man 2 on the horizon until 2015, when he&amp;#039;s lined up a role in Martin Scorsese&amp;#039;s period drama Silence. But for now, we&amp;#039;ve got Garfield withdrawal.  To celebrate Garfield&amp;#039;s 30th birthday, we look back on the five most significant roles from his pre-webslinging days.  Boy A (2007)      Garfield earned a TV BAFTA for his achingly moving breakthrough performance in John Crowley&amp;#039;s drama, which aired on the BBC in the UK but played at several international film festivals including Toronto. Based on the novel by Jonathan Trigell, which was inspired in turn by the real-life Jamie Bulger case, Boy A stars Garfield as a young man released from a young offenders&amp;#039; institution under a new identity, who is struggling to put a vicious childhood crime behind him. Centring on his relationships with his rehab worker (Peter Mullan) and love interest (Katie Lyons), it&amp;#039;s a troubling, incisive and often shattering early showcase for Garfield&amp;#039;s emotional range.  Red Riding: In The Year Of Our Lord 1974 (2009)      Proving once again his ability to play flawed, frequently unpleasant characters with intelligence and humanity, Garfield starred in the first part of Channel 4&amp;#039;s brutal, hypnotic crime saga as cocky young Yorkshire reporter Eddie Dunford. Digging for information on the disappearance of young girls, the naive Dunford becomes drawn into a web of local conspiracy, and also becomes involved with the mother of one of the missing girls (Rebecca Hall). Directed by Julian Jarrold, this first segment is a murky, intricately plotted mystery that&amp;#039;s anchored by Garfield&amp;#039;s performance.  The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)  While it&amp;#039;s most famous for being Heath Ledger&amp;#039;s final film, Terry Gilliam&amp;#039;s scattershot fantasy was also Garfield&amp;#039;s big-screen debut (although Boy A and Red Riding were released theatrically in the US). The idealistic Anton, a sleight-of-hand expert vying for Lily Cole&amp;#039;s affections, isn&amp;#039;t the most multi-dimensional of characters, but Garfield&amp;#039;s got enough natural charm to believably go up against Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell rolled up into one man and still end up with the girl.  Never Let Me Go (2010)  There&amp;#039;s a persistently wounded idealism about Garfield; a sense that all of his characters are in some way doomed to be betrayed by the world they trust. This is never more glaring than in Mark Romanek&amp;#039;s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro&amp;#039;s dystopian novel, in which Garfield plays one of a generation of cloned teenagers who have been bred to lead shortened lives during which their organs are periodically harvested. Critics of the film suggested that Garfield, Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley&amp;#039;s lead characters were too accepting of their fate, but Garfield imbues the sensitive Tommy with a sense of heartbreaking rage, and his chemistry with Mulligan mitigates the film&amp;#039;s chilliness.  The Social Network (2010)  That wounded idealism (or kicked-puppy quality, if you prefer) crops up again in David Fincher&amp;#039;s razor-sharp Facebook origin story. Jesse Eisenberg was rightly feted for his nuanced turn as Mark Zuckerberg, but the importance of Garfield&amp;#039;s role as his mistreated BFF Eduardo Saverin shouldn&amp;#039;t be under-estimated. Aaron Sorkin uses Rooney Mara&amp;#039;s Erica as the impetus for Zuckerberg creating the site that would eventually become Facebook, but she&amp;#039;s largely AWOL from the narrative and the key relationship is between Zuckerberg and the endlessly loyal Saverin, who ends up being the biggest casualty of Zuckerberg&amp;#039;s ego trip. Garfield strikes up an easy chemistry with Eisenberg, offering a warm counterpoint to his twitchy energy and hinting at emotional layers that Sorkin&amp;#039;s script leaves largely unexplored.  Happy birthday, Andrew Garfield! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/news/a507914/andrew-garfield-turns-30-5-best-pre-spider-man-roles/>