Lin-Manuel Miranda didn't need a Spidey sense to figure out that Andrew Garfield was reprising his role as Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Chatting with Jimmy Fallon on Friday, Jan. 28, Miranda shared that Garfield didn't tell him that he was starring in the Marvel superhero film while on the set of Tick, Tick…Boom!, but that his hilarious reaction to being asked about it gave him away.
"The day it leaked he might be involved, he was on my set. We were still filming," Miranda told the late-night host. "And, between shots, I kind of quietly went over to him and was like, ‘Andrew, are you…in the new Spider-Man?'"
The director said that Garfield struggled with the sudden question. "His exact reaction was, ‘What?! Shut up! Shut up! Hahaha! Shut up!'" Miranda recalled in a high-pitched voice. "And I walked away thinking, ‘Oh, he's in the new Spider-Man.'"
According to Miranda, Garfield, who played Peter Parker in two films in the early 2010s, got a lot better at denying his involvement in the film with time.
"Then, when I saw him on your show, he was a total pro at denying it," he joked, referencing when the actor visited The Tonight Show in September. "But…he had to get there."
Miranda wasn't the only person Garfield didn't tell about his appearance in the film. When Emma Stone, whom Garfield dated for four years and who played his Spider-Man's love interest Gwen Stacy, asked if he was at all involved with the new project, the actor remained tightlipped.
"Emma kept on texting me," Garfield said on Josh Horowitz's Happy Sad Confused podcast. "She was like, 'Are you in this new Spider-Man film?' And I was like, 'I don't know what you're talking about.'"
When the movie was released later in December, however, Garfield said that Stone wasn't too pleased with his antics. "She saw it," Garfield said, "and she was like, 'You're a jerk.'"
(E! and NBC are part of the NBCUniversal family.)