Next year, Garfield will appear in an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go with Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan. This year, he stars in the Red Riding Trilogy, a series of pitch-black murder mysteries filmed for British television. For his part as a cocky investigative journalist working in 1974, the actor grew some intense sideburns. “I didn’t shave for about a year and they had to be trimmed down because they were a bit too bushy,” he says, laughing. “I was kind of proud of that.” His girlfriend was less amused. “She was like, ‘Oh my God, you look like one of the Jonas Brothers!’ That was the opposite of what I was going for.”

So let’s talk a bit about The Red Riding Trilogy. You are brutally tortured in the first film. What was it like filming that?
Yeah, brutal. It felt worse than it looked.  It wasn’t fun actually to do those scenes.  I get quite sick of seeing people doing torture scenes. It feels very like, “Now we’re doing a torture scene. Now is going to be my moment to show how good I am at getting tortured.” So there always seems to be a sort of self-consciousness about it as a “cool” thing to do, but it really isn’t. Or wasn’t.  I just thought, “Ok, how am I going to avoid being someone that I diss.” I went pretty deep and it wasn’t fun.  I kind of wish I had just only scratched the surface.

Do you have that choice?
Of course, I could have done it with only scratching the surface and it would have been rubbish.  It would have been pointless.  Those extremes can be quite fun in a way.  It’s kind of masochistic, but if you’re in the mood for a bit of masochism, it’s fun.

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