Andrew Garfield said working on "Tick, Tick ... Boom!" helped 'sew up the wounds' from losing his mother to pancreatic cancer

• Andrew Garfield said his "unexpressed love" for his late mother helped him in "Tick, Tick ... Boom!"
• He said working on the film was like sewing "up the wounds" from her death in 2019.

Andrew Garfield said his "unexpressed love" for his late mother helped him get into character for "Tick, Tick... Boom!"

Garfield plays the late composer Jonathan Larson in the Lin-Manuel Miranda-directed Netflix film. Based on Larson's stage musical of the same name, "Tick, Tick... Boom!" shows the composer about to turn 30 and struggling creatively as he navigates his career and relationships. Larson died of an aortic aneurysm at 35 in 1996, the day his iconic rock musical "Rent" opened to previews Off-Broadway, according to the BBC.

During a recent appearance on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," Garfield said that while working on the film, he "got to sing Jonathan Larson's unfinished song while simultaneously singing for my mother," who died in 2019.

He said that working on the film helped him "heal" and "sew up the wounds" from losing "the most beautiful person that I've ever experienced in my life."

"It's only a beautiful thing. This is all the unexpressed love, right?" the actor told host Stephen Colbert while gesturing to his brother and father in the audience. "The grief that will remain with us, you know, until we pass because we never get enough time with each other, right? No matter if someone lives till 60, 15, or, you know, 99."

Garfield continued that he hopes the "grief" of losing his mother "stays with me because it's all the unexpressed love that I didn't get to tell her" even though they "all told her every day she was the best of us."

He added: "We all know somewhere deep down that life is sacred. Life is short and we'd better just be here as much as possible with each other, holding onto each other."

Garfield previously said in an interview with the New York Times back in September that his mother died shortly before the start of the coronavirus pandemic after "a long battle with pancreatic cancer."

He told the newspaper that he was initially hesitant about sharing news of her death with the world, but ultimately decided to open up because it's "a universal experience."

"I've lost people before, but one's mother is a different thing," he said. "It's the person that gives you life no longer being here. Nothing can prepare you for that kind of cataclysm."

"Tick, Tick... Boom!" is streaming now on Netflix.