Andrew Garfield & Florence Pugh Got A Bit Carried Away With One We Live In Time Sex Scene

Filming intimate scenes must be the weirdest part of an actor's job — and according to Andrew Garfield, he and Florence Pugh made everything much, much weirder by taking a sex scene way too far on the set of their new romantic drama "We Live in Time." 

During a live taping of Josh Horowitz's "Happy Sad Confused" podcast (via a social media post mined by Variety), Garfield literally re-enacted the hilarious moment on set, explaining that he and Pugh had to shoot a sex scene alongside only a couple crew members (for privacy).

"We do the first take of this very intimate, passionate sex scene," Garfield explained. "And it's a closed set, which means it's only me and Florence in a room together and the camera operator, who is our [director of photography], a very lovely man called Stuart [Bentley]. The scene becomes passionate, and we choreographed it, and we get into it, as it were, and we go a little bit further than we were meant to just because we never heard 'cut,' and it's feeling safe and we're like, 'OK, we'll go to the next thing and the next thing, we'll let this progress.'"

So what did the camera man do?

One of the funniest parts of the entire story is that, according to Andrew Garfield, he kept checking in with Florence Pugh when they started shooting the intimate scene, he kept checking to make sure everything he was doing was all right. "She would just laugh at me, because she's very confident in her body and her sexuality and her being," Garfield can be heard saying in the video on social media. "Florence is Florence."

So what happened that led to the two not hearing anyone call "cut" as they got more comfortable with one another? Garfield says that he felt as if the two were "telepathically saying to each other, 'This definitely feels like a longer take.'" When they eventually looked up from their ... situation, Garfield said that Bentley was clearly very uncomfortable.

"I look up, and in the corner is Stuart and our boom operator," Garfield said, getting out of his chair to show the audience exactly what Bentley did in the moment. "Stuart has the camera by his side, and he's turned into the wall." (The way that Garfield played it during his retelling looks like some sort of outtake from the end of "The Blair Witch Project," which makes the whole thing even funnier.)

You should know that, even though this story is genuinely very funny, you should be prepared to do a lot of crying during "We Live in Time." The film, which is directed by John Crowley ("Brooklyn") and written by Nick Payne ("The Last Letter From Your Lover"), focuses on chef Almut Brühl (Florence Pugh) and a representative for a British cereal company, Tobias Durand (Andrew Garfield), who happen to first meet when Almut hits Tobias with her car. (He's mostly unhurt.) As the two form a connection and eventually fall in love, the movie tells their story in a non-linear fashion, jumping from their initial courtship to their long-term relationship to their highs and lows. 

Without spoiling too much of the story, it's safe to say that "We Live in Time," which spans a decade in Almut and Tobias' life, takes a truly devastating turn when Almut tells Tobias that she is suffering from ovarian cancer (which is obviously quite serious but also means it's unlikely that the two can have a child). The sweeping, heartbreaking love story between the two will make you laugh and cry — because, if nothing else, you'll hopefully get a glimpse of that goofy carousel horse from the poster.

"We Live in Time" will receive a limited theatrical release on October 11, 2024.