Andrew Garfield is not just a rebellious peasant in his upcoming action period drama. He’s Robin Hood.
The reveal, confirmed by Focus Features this week on social media, came as a surprise to fans, who assumed The Uprising — releasing in U.S. theaters Sept. 10 — was about the 1381 English Peasants’ Revolt against King Richard II and its leader, Wat Tyler.
But Paul Greengrass’ movie has received a new subtitle: The Rise of Robin Hood, unveiled on X. “Set against the true events of the Uprising that helped inspire the legend of Robin Hood,” reads a new plot synopsis, “[Garfield’s character] forms an army of the people to face the King’s might in a fight for justice.” Before this, the project claimed to tell the story of “a birth of a legend.”
Garfield is credited as just “Ploughman” in the film on IMDB, where he is listed alongside co-stars Jamie Bell, Stephen Dillane, Tom Hollander, Jonny Lee Miller, Thomasin McKenzie and Cosmo Jarvis, who is playing the real-life Wat Tyler. The film will likely depict the Ploughman’s rise from obscurity to notorious outlaw, though most retellings of his story have been set centuries before the Peasants’ Revolt.
The decision to release this element so close to the film’s debut — and not keep it in as a plot twist, or simply begin its marketing run positioned as a Robin Hood movie — has, it seemed, confused social media users. “This actually kinda’ bums me out because as a history nerd I thought someone was actually tackling the Peasants’ Revolt, which is a time in history that could make for some epic films we never see,” said one person on X. “It’s a fucking Robin Hood movie?!” wrote another, who accrued over 13,000 likes. Others are perplexed at the meshing of fact (Wat Tyler and the Revolt) and fiction (Robin Hood).
It makes The Uprising the second Robin Hood film to grace our screens this year, following Hugh Jackman and A24’s The Death of Robin Hood, which failed to break even.
The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to Focus Features for comment, but did not hear back at the time of publication.
In a Esquire profile, published on Tuesday, post-Robin Hood reveal, in which he also discusses playing OpenAI founder Sam Altman in the upcoming Artificial, Garfield made no mention of The Uprising being a Robin Hood tale.
The Social Network, Spider-Man and After the Hunt star is described in the piece as playing “Ploughman, a fictional everyman farmer whose wife and children have died in the Black Death and, when the King’s men come looking for even more tax money to fund foreign wars, has nothing to lose by taking a stand… [His] actions — it turns out he’s handy with a scythe in more ways than one — turn him into a talismanic figure in what would boil over into the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, in which John Ball preached rebellion and Wat Tyler lost his head.”
Garfield tells the outlet that “the truth of that period of time was that there were brutal conditions for working-class people, brutal taxation post-plague, incompetence in government, abusive practices, with the underclass being seen as sub-human creatures from the perspective of those in power.”
When asked whether those conditions could apply to our current world, he says: “Yeah, here and in the United States, and all around the world.”
“One of the things that’s cool about this film is that it’s a bit of a Rorschach Test,” he continued. “A lot of differently politically aligned people will go, ‘Oh, it’s me!’ We get into really dicey territory — and to not see the [British far-right activist] Tommy Robinson stuff as anything but despicable is just ignorant — but I’m sure a bunch of people will look at this film and go, ‘England first! What about us?’ It’ll be very interesting in that regard.”
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