Andrew GarfieldA master at his trade. 

It Amazing Spider-Man actor, 39, recalled how he prepared to portray a Jesuit priest in the 2016 Martin Scorsese-directed drama, Silence—which also starred Adam Driver and Liam Neeson—including studying Catholicism shadowing a real priest in New York for a year.

“It was an amazing spiritual experience. His shared the following: “I practiced a lot of spiritual practices daily, I invented new rituals myself,” he said. Marc Maron: WTF? podcast Aug. 22. I was celibate for 6 months, fasting quite a bit because Adam and me had to lose some weight.

Andrew noted that he had a lot of experience in filming Silence was “very cool,” adding that he “had some pretty wild, trippy experiences from starving myself of sex and food for that period of time.”

The Golden Globe award winner also defended the “misconceptions” around method acting, which “trains actors to use their physical, mental and emotional self in the creation of a character and stresses the way in which personal experience can fire the actor’s imagination,” according to the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute.