Andrew Garfield Says The Uprising Is About Grief, Rage and Finding Freedom When Everything Else Is Gone

Paul Greengrass, Andrew Garfield, Thomasin McKenzie, Katherine Waterston, Woody Norman and historian Dan Jones discussed why The Uprising’s 1381 revolt feels urgently connected to the world today.

Nearly 700 years separate the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 from the present day, but filmmaker Paul Greengrass did not approach The Uprising as distant history.

The Nerd Wire attended a virtual press conference for The Uprising. Greengrass joined stars Andrew Garfield, Thomasin McKenzie, Katherine Waterston and Woody Norman, along with historian and historical adviser Dan Jones. Together, they discussed the grief, inequality and collective fury at the center of the film.

For Greengrass, the deeper he went into the story, the less remote it felt.

“As I kind of got into the world of 1381 and the oligarchs protecting their privileges and the corrupt court and the enraged people, the more it felt like not distant history, but our near tomorrow,” Greengrass said.

The Uprising: A Historical Revolt With a Modern Pulse

Greengrass began writing The Uprising during the COVID-19 lockdown, drawing on Jones’ work about the rebellion. He shaped the material into what he described as a large-scale spectacle about revolution.

The film stars Garfield as the Ploughman, a common man who becomes the leader of a rebellion. He rises up against the rule of King Richard II. Focus Features says the true events behind the revolt helped inspire the legend of Robin Hood.

Jones said the revolt marks one of the earliest moments in English history. That’s when the voices of ordinary people begin to emerge clearly from the historical record. Its defining conditions—a corrupt legal system, entrenched privilege and public rage in the aftermath of a pandemic—also make it feel uncomfortably recognizable.

“They provide what you could call a distant mirror on our world today,” Jones said. “This is when I think history works at its most effective in touching a wide audience: when you look into the past and see something of your own life reflected.”

Both Jones and Greengrass pointed to the destabilizing effect of a pandemic. The Black Death devastated medieval Europe, destroying lives and radically altering the society left behind. Greengrass said that after the first shock of grief begins to recede, what remains can become “a deep, growing rage.”

“People come out of these experiences enraged at the unfairness of the world,” he said. “And that’s really what this film’s sort of tapping into.”

Andrew Garfield found grief and rage in the same wound

Garfield described the Ploughman not as a born warrior, but as a man who has been stripped down by loss. It’s a different register for Garfield, who also has the OpenAI drama Artificial premiering at NYFF this fall.

“There’s hardly any of him left,” Garfield said. “It’s like he has this little thin crust of identity that he is kind of clinging to tooth and nail.”

The story is what drew Garfield to the character and to Greengrass’ screenplay. It speaks directly to a world where truth, justice and even a shared center feel hard to locate. He called the script “a cry of the soul for this very moment we’re in.”

The Ploughman’s strength, Garfield explained, comes partly from his humility. He listens, recognizes pain in others and becomes a leader not through status, but through his ability to connect. When asked whether grief or anger was more valuable in building the character, Garfield rejected the distinction.

“I think they are one and the same,” he said. “They are enmeshed and interrelated.”

For Garfield, that same collective pain drives much of The Uprising — it becomes the force that binds a movement together.

“Change never will be able to happen unless there is a kind of a uniting in grief, a uniting in rage, a uniting in pain,” he said.

He pointed to a moment when Alice, played by McKenzie, sings around a campfire. The Ploughman begins to recognize a community carrying the same wound as his own. People learning to sing, dance, grieve and move together left Garfield feeling “beckoned back into life,” he said.

Power looks different depending on who holds it

That question of power runs through every level of The Uprising.

McKenzie described Alice as someone driven by deep rage and brokenness. Her connection with the Ploughman, however, begins to complicate that fury. The two characters recognize the grief in one another even though they carry and express it differently.

Waterston’s Countess occupies the opposite side of the conflict. She has wealth, status and influence as the king’s mother, but the patriarchal structure around her still holds her back.

Waterston said she valued the character’s silence. She didn’t wish the film had imposed a more modern kind of agency onto her.

“Sometimes today, in an effort to give women more to do in historical stories, we give them a reality that was not theirs,” Waterston said. “I loved her silence in this film and what I was allowed to then explore within that.”

Jones framed The Uprising‘s ensemble as a study in incomplete power. The Countess has rank but limited voice. The Ploughman has no conventional authority but possesses conviction. Alice has rage and purpose while remaining marginalized. And the young Richard has the crown without the age or judgment to understand its weight.

Norman plays Richard II. He said he related to the teenage king’s struggle to find his own power and manage his ego. Richard’s circumstances, though, were considerably more extreme.

“He was incredibly mentally ill and he was the King of England, so his way of power was murder,” Norman joked. “But I find I can relate to that.”

Jones said the country placed enormous hope in a child raised to believe he stood beside God. Instead, that promise curdled into tyranny.

From rebellion to the legend of Robin Hood

The Uprising isn’t a literal Robin Hood origin story. But Greengrass said the revolt helped create the conditions from which the famous outlaw legend grew.

Robin Hood was not one identifiable historical person, Greengrass explained. Criminals and common outlaws carried the name before stories transformed the figure into a folk hero. In the aftermath of the Peasants’ Revolt, outlaw tales became a way to preserve dreams of fairness, justice and resistance.

That history informed the film’s connection to outlaw mythology. For Greengrass, those stories preserved the spirit of the revolt by keeping its dreams of fairness and justice alive.

Garfield sees the character’s apparent powerlessness as the source of a different kind of freedom. Once he loses nearly everything else, the Ploughman still has a connection to the land and his community. Garfield called that connection “true justice.”

Garfield described that transformation as a search for “ultimate power” and “ultimate freedom.” He said it’s something “we’re all kind of desperately seeking in our lives.”

Paul Greengrass wrote and directed The Uprising. It stars Andrew Garfield, Jamie Bell, Stephen Dillane, Tom Hollander, Cosmo Jarvis, Thomasin McKenzie, Jonny Lee Miller, Woody Norman, Katherine Waterston and Sky Yang. The film arrives in theaters next week from Focus Features.