The Amazing Spider-Man was by no means a bad movie, but it didn’t exactly live up to expectations. “The Untold Story” we were promised seemingly ended up on the cutting room floor, while the much talked about POV scenes ended up amounting to pretty much nothing.

The sequel however was abysmal, and while it looked like it was going to set up two more solo movies and a Sinister Six spinoff, the reaction was so overwhelmingly negative that Sony Pictures threw in the towel and ended up making a deal to team with Marvel Studios.

Andrew Garfield has chosen his words carefully when it comes to his feelings on playing Spider-Man, but in a new interview, he made his dissatisfaction with the experience clear.

“I’m loath to judge that experience and paint it as a whole,” the British actor explained. “But there were great things about it. I got to work with incredible actors and a really great director. I was very young — 25, 26 — and I felt young. I’d only done a few films, and I was feeling in the right place. I felt guided into it, and I knew it was the right thing for me to do. I learned a lot about what feels good and what doesn’t feel good and what to say yes to.”

“There’s something that happened with that experience for me where story and character were not actually top of the priority list, ultimately. And I found that really, really tricky. I signed up to serve the story and to serve this incredible character I’d been dressing as since I was 3. Then it gets compromised, and it breaks my heart. I got heartbroken a little bit.”

You can’t blame Garfield for feeling like this, and it has to hurt that he didn’t get the opportunity to play the wall-crawler in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, while The Amazing Spider-Man franchise may have failed, the actor is doing well thanks to a critically acclaimed performance in Hacksaw Ridge and a key role in Martin Scorsese’s Silence.