Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake On Subjectivity, Villains and 'Great Responsibility' in The Social Network

Despite the fact that it's already December, the Oscar race for Best Supporting Actor still feels relatively wide-open. Which made it all the more fascinating to speak with not one, but two buzz-earning hopefuls at the same time, and both from a movie that has no shortage of strong supporting performances to boot. But if there's any hint of off-screen competition between Social Network actors Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake as they prep for possible nominations for their turns as rival Mark Zuckerberg BFFs Eduardo Saverin and Sean Parker, respectively, it didn't show. If anything, these co-stars have only grown closer from the experience of making David Fincher's acclaimed Facebook movie. (See? Social media does bring people together!)

Garfield and Timberlake sat down in Los Angeles for a lengthy conversation with Movieline to revisit their work on The Social Network. When the two weren't sharing inside jokes and paying each other hearty, heartfelt compliments, they discussed the film's subjective eye, their trust in Aaron Sorkin's script, why neither studied their real-life counterparts as research, and which character they think is the true villain of the story. (Hint: they disagree).

Andrew, you originally read for the part of Mark Zuckerberg before David cast you as Eduardo Saverin. Justin, when the script came to you were you pitched on playing the character of Sean Parker?

TIMBERLAKE: I was. Everything happened really fast as far as David saying yes, Aaron saying yes, the script getting written, the parts being cast, going into rehearsal, shooting the movie. Once David said yes, he wanted to cast quickly and rehearse quickly and shoot quickly. It's a story he wanted to tell quickly. The audition process for us was like a whirlwind, and the rehearsal process was very quick. It was three weeks. But it was so dense, chock full of information.

GARFIELD: Maybe he wanted to make it quickly because of the nature of the story itself, and how quick that site was founded and how recent it was. Maybe he wanted that feeling, on set or in the process, that Mark had -- that kind of impetus to get something online now, now, now!

TIMBERLAKE: The compulsiveness of how it came to be, yeah. That's what I think makes the movie so special. It's funny that David said that [he wanted to make the "Citizen Kane of John Hughes movies"] because I feel like that's what he's done. This is Generation Y. This is who we are as a young people now.

Many of the film's strengths lie in the larger themes Aaron Sorkin wrote into the script, but it was based on a true story. What are your thoughts on how those lines of fiction and fact are blurred in the telling of said story?

TIMBERLAKE: Well that's part of the story, isn't it? It's a big part of the story that Aaron wanted to embrace, and I think it's more interesting that if we were sitting in a deposition and the three of us were fighting over something, that we'd all have a different story about who invented it and who could claim ownership of what. I think that Aaron embraced that. It's not exactly Rashomon-style, but it's sort of a modern spin on it because everyone's got their own point of view. Much like in a courtroom drama, you go from this deposition room to these stories and this world that these guys live in and everyone's got their own truth. I love that that's what's embraced about it, that you have to walk away just saying, well, that's what it was.

GARFIELD: He sets it up incredibly in the first scene; the first time it cuts into the deposition room that we see for the first time, Jesse [Eisenberg]'s first line is, "That's not what happened." And it immediately calls everything that we're seeing in the past into question. It makes us think about whose perspective this particular part of the story is, and like Justin said there are a great many truths to one situation. If that wasn't the case, then there'd be no arguments, no divorces, no... I don't know. That's the point: We're all living our own subjective realities, so inevitably there are going to be discrepancies between subjective fact.

Did you seek out the real life Sean Parker while prepping your performance?

TIMBERLAKE: I did not seek him out, but ironically I did meet him. It was so brief, though. I think it's important to say that none of us wanted... it's not like we were playing Ray Charles or playing Arnold Palmer, somebody who's a huge public figure. None of us wanted to impersonate these people. I think we felt that was irresponsible and also sort of without heart. Also, it's kind of more fun to act and create a character, but I think we trusted that Aaron spent so much time and had to go through so much of a legal process to write this film that what we were basing our performances on was given to [him]. Aaron has said that the people he'd spoken to who were involved with his research wanted their anonymity and he wanted to honor that, and I respect that. But Aaron also tells a story that originally he wrote that Mark made a screwdriver [but changed it to] a beer. And not only that, it's a Beck's beer because he was able to find out that it was a Beck's beer. So when you know that he knows what brand of beer they were drinking, you go, OK, he knows a lot about what happened from people who, if you were to rank the sources based on the characters, were pretty high in rank. And I think we trusted that, and it was our job to make the characters live and breathe and emote. The way Aaron writes it's more of a drill of just not getting in the way of it.

GARFIELD: I would have absolutely loved to have sat with Eduardo because I think as soon as all of us were cast in the film, or even while we were auditioning, we were thinking this is a great responsibility we were taking on because this happened not very long ago and it's based on real life, living, breathing human beings walking the Earth somewhere. Taking that into your own hands is incredibly fragile and tender and we all approached it with that same kind of sensitivity. So my first instinct was, [Eduardo] needs to let me know that I can do this. He needs to give me some kind of blessing. That wasn't possible and I would have loved to have done that -- and I did pursue it -- but I was told by the producer Dana Brunetti and many other people in the know that it was impossible to reach Eduardo. And even if I did manage to track him down, he would probably run a mile because he's under legal obligation to not say anything under pain of death.

TIMBERLAKE: All of them are. When I did run into Sean Parker I did ask him one question, if he had read the script. But I knew that he had already read the script. I asked him that because I just sort of wanted to see if he would say that he had read it, and he was very frank with me in saying that he wasn't at liberty to discuss anything related to it outside of a moderated environment. And I respect that.

Your characters work as the angel and demon on Mark Zuckerberg's shoulders, so to speak. Would you go so far as to call Sean Parker the villain of the film? Is there one?

TIMBERLAKE: I think if there was a villain in the movie, it might be Sean. But I don't know, I think it was more important for me to find what was more alike in Mark and Sean more than anything, because I felt like that was the best place to start with the character. They both suffered from the same insecurity and fear and paranoia and they both invented something to make them more comfortable in communicating with the world. Mark invented Facebook; Sean invented Sean Parker. And not to embarrass Andrew, but his character and his performance is really the heart of the film. Without his performance, there is no heart to break. It's so integral; it's something you can hold onto.

GARFIELD: On the flip side of that, I disagree totally that Sean is the villain. I don't think there is a villain. It's all gray, like we all are as human beings. That's what's so rare about a story like this and a script like this and a movie like this, the fact that a movie was made about characters that weren't, figuratively speaking, black or white. But what I found so confusing and befuddling when I first saw the film was that all of us had been through our own subjective experiences in making this film and we were all convinced that our perspective, our character's perspective, was the righteous, authentic, honest -- the real -- perspective. We all felt like we all behaved well.

Then of course a few months pass and the film comes out and you watch it, and what's amazing is that I came away totally understanding everything that Justin did, every decision that Justin/Sean made throughout the journey. And also Jesse/Mark, I felt like I understood. That was very difficult for me because going through the scenes with these guys was f***ing horrible, it was hard. My job was to care about Jesse. To try and support Jesse and see him as my brother, nurture him and try to bring out his higher nature and make sure that he was guided through his college experience and supported. To make sure that whatever inspired him was being fed. I wanted to encourage that in him, because I felt like Eduardo just thrived being around him and being in his company, feeling like an older brother in certain ways. So to go through that with Jesse and Justin and to watch it played back, then to be able to understand the alternate, was a testament to Aaron's writing and David's direction.

Stay tuned Thursday for part two of our discussion with Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake...