“I’ve given all of those hours to nothing,” he said.

Andrew Garfield admits he’s ‘addicted’ to his secret Instagram account: ‘My screen time notifications are horrific’

“I’ve given all of those hours to nothing,” he said.

By Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel is a news writer at **. He began writing for EW in 2022.

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August 22, 2026 2:09 p.m. ET

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Andrew Garfield in New York City on July 29, 2026. Credit:

Cindy Ord/WireImage

- Andrew Garfield admitted he has a secret Instagram account that he is “addicted” to.

- The *We Live in Time* actor said that his “screen time notifications are horrific.”

- “I’ve given all of those hours to nothing,” he said.

Andrew Garfield doesn’t have public social media accounts, but that isn’t stopping him from being addicted to his phone.

The *Silence* star told *Variety* that he has a secret Instagram account. “I’m as addicted as anybody,” he said. “My screen time notifications are horrific to me. It’s like, I’ve given all of those hours to nothing.”

Garfield said that he’s particularly drawn to “weird ceramics” and “lots of Japanese kind of craftspeople” on the platform.

“It’s genuinely enraging because we don’t have as much control over these impulses as we should, and it’s been by design,” he said. “It’s pretty dark when you look at it.”

The *Tick, Tick… Boom!* actor wishes he could break free from his smartphone habit. “I think we’ve all had the impulse to smash our phones or throw it into the forest or throw it into the sea because we know it’s taking our lives from us in some way,” he said. “I’m not better than anybody else. I’ve been told, and I find it to be true, that if you leave your phone in another room, that does a lot of the heavy lifting. As soon as it’s in the room, you’re kind of f---ed.”

Garfield’s latest project is *The Magic Faraway Tree*, which centers on a family with technology-addicted kids who are swept into a fantasy adventure. Despite the movie’s themes, Garfield said that phones weren’t banned on set.

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“They weren’t, but you know they didn’t really need to be,” he said. “Our intention with the film wasn’t to damn technology. We didn’t want to say that all technology is evil and bad. We wanted to just have a healthier relationship with it.”

He continued, “That was the ethos on set as well. We don’t need to ban stuff, but we just don’t want to be completely taken over by these things.”

Andrew Garfield in ‘The Magic Faraway Tree’.

The *Social Network* actor also stars in another upcoming project about technology: *Artificial*, Luca Guadagnino’s film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

“I am kind of drawn to the question of: how do we live in a balanced way right now, with all of these amazing technologies that are being created that are giving us so many opportunities that make life so much more convenient, but also maybe are creating a tension between us being able to be really connected to our true selves?” he reflected on the *Today* show last month.

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Garfield also suggested that new technologies are hindering our connections “with each other” and “to all this beautiful nature that surrounds us” around the world. “How are we doing the job that we’re supposed to do, which I believe is [to] be the custodians of our planet?” he asked. “How do we take care of our planet in the way that we are meant to as conscious beings on this planet? And I feel like there is a tension there. It’s a tension I’m very, very curious about.”

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