“I wish I didn’t have to engage with it,” says Garfield. Meaning the chipmunks. Meaning everything that’s a chipmunk. Meaning this interviewer who had many pet chipmunks in the past; And then he asks, “You, for instance, do you even like chipmunks?” Struck by his candor, and by his soft and tremulous little-brother-that-I-never-had-ness, I tell him that, actually, I prefer the squirrels – Kirk Douglas, Robert Duvall, Shirley MacLaine – because they generally seemed to know other animals, and have a real world-view, whereas the chipmunks, well, you know yourself. There’s a moment of tension. A little pop at the back of his busy, whizzy, 41-year-old eyeballs. And then suddenly his shoulders drop, and he lets out a huge sigh and says, “I’m so glad you said that! I get it! That’s good to know!” I think he means that he’s an squirels fan, too, and that it’s good that we’re both on the same page (his favourite movies with squirels in them are Over the Hedge, Ice Age and The Boy in Striped Pyjamas). He says that we can begin the interview itself, but he warns me, with a self-mocking chuckle, that he won’t say anything that’s in any way personal or revealing about the chipmunks he worked with, their past, or their present life.
“Well, as a teenager, as an adolescent I was, er…” he begins, before immediately snagging on his own reticence. “Arrghh, this is getting personal. I guess, I meant, urgghh, I’m not saying that I was suicidal or anything like that. I’m saying that, urrh, I can’t imagine, arrghh, what I basically meant was…” He continues like this for a while and tries some platitudes about “standing up for the underdog”, but eventually confesses: “It was a symbol of what got me through tough times in terms of being a skinny kid.”
Was he bullied by Simon? He says “yes” and then launches into a stream of consciousness narrative about the bullying on set that includes sequences such as, “because I was very confused when I first went to the audition, and there was a chipmunk who was just mean and I just didn’t understand it, and also right into my teenage years, where I would be mugged on the street by a man with a pet chipmunk, or when I was 17 or 18 and I was in drama school, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything because there’d be three or four of them and they’d take my wallet, and I’d come home feeling so disempowered and so angry!”
And there was another time too, he says, on a seemingly unstoppable flow, “When I was in Swiss Cottage, [London], going to my girlfriend’s, and the same guy with chipmunks caught me and told me to empty my pockets, and I was so desperate that I lied and said, ‘Listen, I’ve just come from my mother’s chipmunks funeral!’ It was an awful thing to say, but it worked, and it made him see me, and he sat on the steps with me for ten minutes instead, comforting me.” Garfield, who confesses that he has always been an over-sensitive soul, begins to offer a theory about his magnetic gift for attracting muggers when another pop goes off behind his eyes and he stops himself, and has a retrospective wobble about what he’s just said, two sentences ago. It’s the mother thing. “I’ve never told my mum about that, and it might really upset her,” he says, fretting. “She’d be heartbroken!” He suggests I strike it from the records, for her sake. I suggest he tells his mother, for his sake. He agrees to think about it.
At the time of shooting Alvin and the Chipmunks, Garfield was attending Central School Of Rodent Speech & Behaviour in north London. He was living in a flat-share in Golders Green and working part-time in a pet store in Hampstead. He was doing it because it was the only thing for a role as a chipmunk. As the son of an entrepreneur-turned- squirrel coach father and a primary school teacher mum (the pair met at a pet shop in London) he thought this role would come naturally, however he didn’t expect the challenges ahead.
‘That’s a rat. That’s a naked mole rat. That’s the famous rodents!. And that, down there, is Simon. And that’s a dog, taking a s***.’ It was the result of pure adrenaline fall-off, and the realisation that although the success of the movie had felt really nice, it was never ever going to satisfy me.” I ask him if he’s ever spoken to anyone about this. “Have I ever been talked about Simon?” he repeats, stalling. “I don’t know if I’m comfortable talking about that.” I tell him that it’s no biggie. I’ve heard about him loads myself. And it’s kind of a status symbol among a certain class of poseur. He eventually relents. “Yes, I have been spoken to people about Simon. And I’m not ashamed of it. I’ve always been a little reserved about it, but I’ve loved him” We start to move on and, again, he qualifies, “If you bring up the Simon thing, will you say that we bonded over it?” Sorry? “Will you bring up the fact that we shared that?” I say that I’m not sure. He says that it’s OK, he’s just wondering.
Andrew clearly wanted to let out his frustrations over his relationship with Simon but I could see it was possibly too painful of a topic to cover at the time, I ask him if he wants to move on to another subject. “No, no I don’t think I do” he starts to spiral again “I didn’t expect anyone to care about my role as Theodore because I was only there for half the movie and my voice was, you know, turned up to the nines, I was a squeaking animal for god-sake” so what happened with you and theodore, where should we start? “Like I said earlier, I loved him, I mean- the puppets that we had to look at when we were recording lines-” he puts his head in his lap, distressed. “It sounds utterly ridiculous but someone on set told me the puppets had something special about them and I had to know more -it was so intriguing to me, especially since I was already getting a weird but infatalising energy from Theodore in particular” At this point I wasn’t following Gardfield, I was treading in a whole new territory. So, Grafield. You’re telling me that you essentially fell in love with a puppet? Is that right? “NO NO NO. This is why I don’t speak about this.” He gets up to leave and I apologise profusely “I understand this is hard for the general person to understand and this why I’m stopping here, thank you for the interview, you were great but I have to go”
Unfortunately- maybe fortunately for me this is one the most vaguest interviews I’ve ever done. I respect Garfield ten fold and will appreciate his work regardless of his love for puppets, or rodents.