Andrew Garfield reveals how he, Tom Holland, Tobey Maguire, and director Jon Watts designed Spider-Man: No Way Home‘s multiversal Spider-Men dynamics with an improvisational approach to their shared MCU story. Spider-Man: No Way Home marks the first MCU appearance for several characters, including Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Men, as well as five of their enemies. Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Men entered Spider-Man: No Way Home‘s plot halfway through, and they became brother-like figures for Tom Holland’s Peter Parker by Spider-Man: No Way Home‘s ending, before they returned to their original timelines.

Speaking to Ryan Reynolds in an episode of Variety‘s “Actors on Actors”, Andrew Garfield recalls how Spider-Man: No Way Home director Jon Watts allowed the three Spider-Man actors to explore their characters freely, encouraging them to improvise without worrying too much about the script. Garfield describes the experience of working closely with fellow actors Tom Holland and Tobey Maguire as a “Spider-Man support group”, delving into the complexities of their respective heroes. Check out Andrew Garfield’s full conversation with fellow Marvel star Ryan Reynolds below:

It was a beautiful thing to genuinely feel like you were a support of a Spider-Brother, and I do mean that sincerely. It was a genuinely lovely. And Jon Watts, such a great director. He was so loose, he was so relaxed. I was like, ‘So what are we gonna do about what’s on the page? Because we need to work on it.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ll work on it.’ And it’s like, ‘Ok, but when?’ He’s like, ‘Well we’ll improvise a lot.’ And I’m like, ‘Great. Great! Really?’ It was beautiful. […] It was suddenly like oh, we have an opportunity that no one’s ever had where it’s like a Spider-Man support group. What does that look like, let’s really go down to the nuts and bolts and the studs—what could that look like? What’s the dynamic that we could build that is completely specific and unique to these particular Spider-people.