Andrew Garfield Wants Billionaires Scared of a Failed Revolt

Andrew Garfield told a Los Angeles screening he hopes billionaires leave The Uprising scared shitless. The Paul Greengrass film about England’s 1381 Peasants’ Revolt opens in the United States on September 10, and Spencer Pratt spent Sunday asking who, exactly, signs the actor’s checks.

Garfield, 43, was answering a takeaway question after the movie, which Focus Features is selling as a ferocious rebellion against King Richard II. Pratt, the reality-TV fixture and former Los Angeles mayoral candidate, quoted the clip and pointed at the people who greenlight films.

A Line Focus Features Did Not Script

The remark landed on Thursday, September 3, during a Q&A taped by the film site The Movie Report. An audience member asked Garfield what he wanted people to carry home. He started with ticket sales, then climbed into a sermon, then took the swing that left the clip.

Well, first I hope they come and see it, first thing. Secondly, I hope it’s galvanizing. I hope there’s some awakening that people feel that they feel that their own that we all feel like our own struggles are being reflected in the struggles of these characters from a distant time and place and that it could be directive. And I hope that if any billionaires watch it, they’re scared shitless.

Andrew Garfield, Los Angeles screening of The Uprising, September 3, 2026

He did not leave it there. Healing, he said, should include the rich, “cuz they’re the ones that might be the most soul sick.” Greengrass, sitting beside him, told a story about a journalist who watched a tax collector get swept off a table and thought of a gas bill. The room laughed. The clip did not need the laugh to travel.

In an earlier interview Garfield had already framed 1381 as brutal tax after plague, rotten government, and an underclass treated as less than human, and he called the film a Rorschach test that people on more than one side might claim. He also talked about dignity and a “possibility of healing.” The screening line was shorter, and it is the one people forwarded.

Spencer Pratt Named Who Signs the Checks

Pratt answered on September 6 in the voice he used on the campaign trail, the same register that powered a long-shot Los Angeles mayor bid last spring. He did not argue medieval history. He asked whether the billionaires who greenlight movies and pay multi-million-dollar salaries were the scary ones, or the good ones, and he added that Garfield had just been paid, in Pratt’s telling, about $5 million to play Sam Altman in Artificial.

https://x.com/spencerpratt/status/2096665656703820248

That $5 million figure is Pratt’s. Artificial, Luca Guadagnino’s $40 million film about Altman’s 2023 firing and return at OpenAI, has not opened; Neon has it, with a New York Film Festival berth on October 5. What is not in dispute is the stacking: Garfield shot the Altman picture first, then went straight into a fourteenth-century peasant. Millionaires taking shots at billionaires is a closed loop, and the insult only works if the speaker stays on the safe side of the new line. The line moved. Millionaire used to be the problem. Billionaire is the word that still lets a movie star talk.

More financiers will have their names on this movie than will buy a ticket to be frightened by it. Pratt’s joke is crude and it is also the one the marketing department cannot unsay.

A Fictional Ploughman Lets the Crown Walk

Garfield does not play Wat Tyler. He plays Ploughman, a made-up farmer whose wife and children died in the Black Death, who snaps at a tax collector, and who becomes a talisman for the rising. Cosmo Jarvis plays Tyler. Jamie Bell plays the priest John Ball. Woody Norman plays Richard II as a 14-year-old haunted by dreams of demons. Katherine Waterston, Tom Hollander, Stephen Dillane, Thomasin McKenzie, and Jonny Lee Miller fill the court, the church, and the city.

Greengrass wrote and directed. Jason Blum is among the producers. Principal photography ran from September to November 2025 in Upper Bavaria and Franconia, with up to 5,000 extras. The cut runs 128 minutes and is rated R in the United States for violence and bloody images. Focus Features closed a domestic rights deal estimated at around $11 million. The project had already shed two stars, Benedict Cumberbatch when it was called The Hood, then Matthew McConaughey when it was called The Rage, before Garfield sat down in the lead.

The film’s last move is the tell. After the king has Tyler killed and the rebels walked into a trap, the ploughman comes back a year later in a green hood in Sherwood Forest, threatens Richard, and spares him so the boy king will live in fear. That is the wish Garfield voiced in the screening room, written as an ending. It is also the part 1381 did not provide.

How the 1381 Revolt Ended

The historical rising was short, ugly, and lost as a revolution. Its spark was the unpopular poll tax of 1380, piled onto wage caps after the Black Death and onto wars that were going badly in France. Britannica’s editors call it the first great popular rebellion in English history, and they also say it failed completely as a social revolution.

THE 1381 REVOLT, WEEK BY WEEK

1. May 1381: Riots start in Essex after officials hunt poll-tax evaders, then spread through Kent.
2. June 13, 1381: Wat Tyler’s Kentish column enters London, kills Flemish merchants, and burns John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace.
3. June 14, 1381: Richard meets Essex men at Mile End and promises cheap land, free trade, and an end to serfdom, while rebels in the city take the Tower and behead Archbishop Simon of Sudbury and treasurer Robert Hales.
4. June 15, 1381: At Smithfield, London’s mayor cuts Tyler down in the king’s presence; Richard talks the rest into dispersing.
5. About June 25, 1381: Bishop Henry le Despenser crushes the East Anglian rising. The whole affair lasts less than a month.

Richard forgot the promises. World History Encyclopedia records that around 150 rebels were hanged, enough that new gibbets had to be built, and that Tyler’s head went up on London Bridge. The same account gives the king his line: “villeins ye are, and villeins ye shall remain.” The poll tax was not tried again for centuries, and serfdom later withered in the market, but the men who marched into London did not leave with self-rule, and they did not leave the crown living in fear. They left it standing.

The Robin Hood Title Lasted Three Weeks

Focus Features spent most of the campaign selling a historical epic. On August 20, three weeks before opening, it issued a new trailer under a new name, The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood, with Garfield in green, masked, holding a bow. The fresh logline said the 1381 rising helped inspire the Robin Hood legend. Entertainment Film Distributors, handling Britain, said the opposite: the film is about the Peasants’ Revolt, not Robin Hood, and UK materials would not use the name. The U.S. site still carries the Robin Hood sentence.

The timing was clumsy because another Robin Hood movie had just finished dying in public. Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood, with Hugh Jackman, opened June 19 through A24 on 1,762 screens.

TWO ROBIN HOOD FILMS, ONE SUMMER

Jackman’s film had a $20 million budget and a domestic total of $5,355,164 after that domestic opening of $2,867,662. It sat at No. 9 on its first weekend. Britain then slipped The Uprising from a shared September 11 plan to October 9. Early U.S. screening notes, which usually run hot, came back mixed to poor: a slog, a confused mess, Bourne-style shake and cut in a period picture. John Campea called it a sweeping backdrop ruined by messy narrative and a disjointed flow. Focus is still asking an audience to buy a peasant war that spent three weeks pretending to be Robin Hood.

From Sam Altman Straight Into a Peasant

Garfield has been unusually blunt about the double booking. He shot Artificial, playing Altman as a modern emperor in a game he intends to win, then walked onto Greengrass’s mud. Playing Ploughman, he said, felt like a healing response to that part, the man at the mercy of rules after the man who writes them. The order mattered to him. The quotes sit on top of each other now whether he likes the stack or not.

Artificial itself had a messy trip to a screen. Amazon MGM Studios dropped the nearly finished film after a giant cloud partnership with OpenAI; other buyers passed; Neon took it. Garfield is still the face of a living billionaire in a $40 million picture that festivals have not even shown. Pratt did not need a confirmed salary number for the contrast to hold. One job is the plough. The other is Sam Altman. The screening hoped the second group would sit in the dark and feel afraid.

Greengrass has made his name on panic and crowds, from United 93 to the Bourne films, and a tax revolt after plague is in his range. The problem is not that a director of state violence made a movie about state violence. The problem is the takeaway the star chose, on camera, with three days of runway left.

Thursday’s Screens Still Need Bodies

Focus Features has The Uprising in theaters on September 10, a Thursday, with showtimes already posted. The UK waits until October 9. No tracking figure has been published that would make a distributor calm, and the clip now doing the work of a trailer is not a battle scene. It is a movie star hoping the rich are frightened, then a reality star asking who paid him.

WHAT THE UPRISING IS WALKING INTO

• The clip: The line about billionaires is easier to share than a 128-minute tax war, and it now sits on top of the title.
• The last hood: A Robin Hood film that opened to $2,867,662 in June is still the nearest comparison, fair or not.
• The rebrand: U.S. materials still nod at Robin Hood; British materials refuse the name, so the movie arrives as two different products.
• The ending: The ploughman lets Richard live in fear. The record of 1381 is a dead captain, forgotten charters, and a king who kept the crown.

Garfield asked for galvanizing and for ticket sales in the same breath. He can have only one of those if the other becomes the joke. Pratt supplied the joke. On the Focus Features site, September 10 is already a list of auditoriums.