Steady yourselves, people of Earth: Justin Timberlake is on crutches. But as the singer-actor-pop demigod told me as he hobbled in for an in-depth chat alongside Social Network co-star/future Spider-Man Andrew Garfield last night, his injured leg may or may not be cause for concern -- and thankfully, it didn't stop him from making our late-night rendezvous.
"Something in my calf muscle is really messed up," Timberlake explained. "I hurt it doing a stunt last night on the last set-up that we had on this film I'm doing called Now. I was jumping off of a table onto the floor. It's a previous injury that was aggravated, and something popped. I have to get an MRI tomorrow... so I hope it's not as bad as I think it might be."
Timberlake and Garfield sat down with Movieline at the Arclight Cinema in Hollywood late Thursday night to discuss their work in the awards-season hopeful The Social Network. We'll have the full two-part interview for you next week, but for now, hold yourself over with a few tasty tidbits:
Garfield on co-star and recent recipient of the National Board of Review award for Best Actor, Jesse Eisenberg: "It's very easy to care about Jesse as a person. He's incredibly innocent and he's incredibly smart and gifted and caring, and your natural instinct when you're around Jesse is to care for him. You want to protect him."
Timberlake on the appeal of playing The Social Network's pseudo-villain, Sean Parker: "Mark [Zuckerberg] invented Facebook, and Sean invented Sean Parker. What I saw was an opportunity to touch on something dark, some sort of sociopath-ish behavior."
Garfield on stepping into Spider-Man's Spandex suit: "I compare it to how we don't get bored of seeing different people play Hamlet, and we don't get bored of seeing different people play King Lear. I consider this role as the same kind of mythology as those roles. There are modern myths, and I feel like this is just another generation and a legacy that will hopefully go on forever meaning so much to other skinny boys throughout the ages."
Check back next week for the rest of our chat with Timberlake and Garfield on playing real-life Facebook figures Sean Parker and Eduardo Saverin and their takes on the awards-season marathon at its midpoint.
[Photo: Getty Images]