LOS ANGELES — Andrew Garfield is no stranger to inhabiting men wrestling with God, from a 17th-century Jesuit priest in “Silence” to Desmond Doss in “Hacksaw Ridge” and televangelist Jim Bakker in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.” And in Paul Greengrass’ “The Uprising,” the 43-year-old British actor once again finds himself in spiritual territory as the Ploughman, an ordinary farmer swept into the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
This time, however, his character’s journey is one of disentangling God from a religious system that, Garfield told The Christian Post, has distorted Christianity in the service of wealth and power.
“What the Ploughman goes through is a kind of dismantling of a bastardized form of Christianity that he’s been living under, and it’s been oppressive for his people,” the Golden Globe Award-winning actor said in a sit-down interview alongside Greengrass and co-star Thomasin McKenzie.
At one point, after witnessing horrific bloodshed (the Focus Features film is rated “R” for violence), Ploughman asks, bleakly, “Where is God in all of this?”
According to Garfield, that wrestling reflects his character’s inability to reconcile God’s goodness with the misuse of religion. In the film’s world, set in England in 1381, challenging the king’s divinely sanctioned authority, considered God’s mouthpiece, could have devastating consequences.
“You’re literally living under the threat of a hierarchical society where if you question that the king is the mouthpiece of God, that’s kind of treasonous,” Garfield said. “So I think there’s a kind of imprisonment that feels, you know, there’s something wrong, something’s amiss.”
“The Uprising,” releasing in theaters Sept. 10, unfolds in the aftermath of the Black Death, which killed roughly half the country’s population and left behind widespread grief, poverty, anger and economic upheaval. When those surrounding the young King Richard II impose a brutal tax on the poor, simmering resentment erupts into rebellion, sending tens of thousands marching toward London.
Greengrass, the filmmaker behind several installments of the “Bourne” franchise, positions Ploughman as an unlikely leader, a Robin Hood of sorts, of thousands of peasants demanding justice from leaders who insist their authority comes from God, alongside historical figures Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) and John Ball (Jamie Bell). As Ploughman begins to question those who govern his world, he realizes that perhaps their version of Christianity is distorted as well.
Garfield pointed to England’s older spiritual traditions and “finding God, as it were, in all things,” including “in nature, finding God in the trees, in the wind, in the ancestors, in other people.”
“I feel like there’s a kind of an emergence of that happening for the character during the film, during the story,” he said. “And it seems like Christianity has been hijacked by those that want to hoard and keep power and money and influence and status for themselves. So I think there’s a kind of deconstruction of that happening.”
According to Greengrass, religion, and the way it was often exploited, could hardly be separated from a story about medieval England. During that time, faith shaped how people understood not only God, but justice, political authority and their place in the social order.
“People were very, very religious in those times,” he said. “But the issues are the same.”
“People understood in this story that the world was rigged, deeply unfair,” Greengrass said. “The wealthy had stacked up the riches of the world and were locking the ordinary people out, and that was an offense, as they understood it, against God’s law, which is God’s law stands for justice and for fairness.”
Greengrass said he began thinking seriously about the Peasants’ Revolt during the COVID-19 pandemic. The 71-year-old English director said he was struck by parallels between the social upheaval following the Black Death and a modern world grappling with institutional distrust in the wake of the pandemic.
“In many ways, that’s the situation that we find ourselves in today,” he said. “One of the reasons why I wanted us all to make this film was because the themes feel so contemporary.”
“I’m not making a political point,” he added. “But I think most people, wherever they sit on the political spectrum, feel that the world is not as fair as it should be, and somewhere that reflects God’s law. Man has made a different settlement to the settlement that we should have, and that, I think, animated people then, and I think it animates people today too.”
The film also explores the juxtaposition of faith and injustice in McKenzie’s Alyce, a fictional young woman who represents the women who participated in the uprising. Alyce, a bright-eyed peasant bent on revenge, had entered the church believing it would protect her, but instead experienced betrayal.
“She went to the church, became a nun, thinking she’d find safety in that world because the plague was ripping through England,” McKenzie said. “It was either kind of like becoming a nun or submitting to destitution. There weren’t many options for her as a woman in this day and age.”
“She was betrayed by that church that she thought she would be protected by,” McKenzie said. “And so that’s what really motivated her anger. … Her relationship with God and with the church became a very angry and betrayed one.”
Yet revenge does not give Alyce what she expects. Once she has released some of that fury, McKenzie said, her character is left confronting an unsettling question: What comes next?
“She was left feeling alone and feeling like, well, you know, that’s happened, and now what?” she said.
McKenzie said that for Ploughman, Alyce and others participating in the revolt, the answer is found in the possibility of “a new community” fueled “by love.”
Greengrass said he also wanted to explore the idea of “spiritual homelessness” in the film due to its relevance in modern culture. Faith, the film suggests, can survive the dismantling of the structures that misuse and claim ownership of it.
“I think people generally feel very lost and very unanchored by these vast forces that are changing our society,” the director said. “And people look to faith as an anchor in a stormy world.”
“That, I think, was true then,” he added, “and it’s true now.”
“The Uprising” opens Sept. 10.
Leah M. Klett is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: [email protected]
