Andrew Garfield has seen your horse memes — and he kinda expected them.

The actor is next starring in We Live in Time, which opens on Oct. 11 before expanding wide on Oct. 18. In the film, he stars as newly-divorced Tobias, whose collision (literally) with Almut (Florence Pugh) sends him on a journey of love and loss. But the beautiful, non-linear storytelling was temporarily eclipsed when an image of the film leaked, featuring a buck-toothed, wild-eyed carousel horse horning in on Garfield and Pugh's date night.

Soon, the horse was popping up in internet memes all over the place, being photoshopped into iconic movie scenes and more. It even got a major feature in Stephen Colbert's Late Show monologue. "That pony is tripping balls on ketamine," Colbert quipped. The horse then popped up on screen for a brief interview with Colbert.

A24

But from the moment he saw the image, Garfield suspected it could go viral. "I saw it and I thought, 'Oh, that's distracting,'" he tells Entertainment Weekly. "'I'm sure they know what they're doing though. That's probably just me. I'm just probably hyper-vigilant. I'm probably the only one that's noticing this freaky horse in the foreground.' And then I went away on a retreat, and I had my phone off for six days. Then, I came back from the retreat, and it was a part of Colbert's opening monologue and all the memes that followed. I was like, 'Okay. I guess other people noticed.'"

"It is very distracting and prominent in the frame," he continues. "It was a mistake."

Still, that doesn't mean that Garfield was upset by the turn of events. "Listen, it's created a lot of joyful content for a lot of people, including myself," he adds. "I cried with laughter when I discovered all the memes."

This was evident in a joint interview Garfield and Pugh did with the Associated Press. "Man, I love the horse meme," he said before the duo talked about some of their favorites.

Courtesy of A24

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Someone who was taken aback by it, however, was director John Crowley. "I'm not a social media creature," he says. "The first time I heard of it was seeing the clip of the Colbert piece, which was genius. I thought it was hysterically funny, though. I then caught up with all the memes, and my kids think it's the coolest thing ever. I could no more have picked that horse's head up as a thing which would be commented on than anything else. It's very funny, isn't it? What people see that you do not see yourself."

Still, Crowley does note that the horse was not a creation of his art department. It was part of a real, working Victorian steam fair. "Those horses were absolutely real," he notes. "It's just something about that frame, that actual image with the horse looking like it's crashing their date in some way. But the entire carousel was horses that looked like that. And now they will never look the same to me again."