Minor spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home ahead.

In the new addition to the Spider-Man franchise starring Tom Holland, Spider-Mans of the past make a brief appearance, including actor Andrew Garfield. Spider-Man: No Way Home includes both Garfield and Toby Maguire and it managed to be kept very hush-hush. In a new interview on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Garfield said his former girlfriend and co-star Emma Stone was trying to pry the secret out of him—so he had to lie.

“Emma kept on texting me. She was like, ‘Are you in this new ‘Spider-Man’ film?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Garfield claimed. “She was like, ‘Shut up, just tell me,’ And like, I honestly… I kept it going, even with her, it’s hilarious. And then she saw it and was like, ‘You’re a jerk!’”

Stone played Garfield's love interest Gwen Stacy in 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man and its 2014 sequel. They dated after meeting on set for the first movie for about four years.

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Garfield also discussed having to keep the plot twist a secret in an interview with The Wrap, saying, “It was like this massive game of Werewolf that I was playing with journalists and with people guessing, and it was very fun. There were moments where I was like, ‘God, I hate lying.’ I don’t like to lie and I’m not a good liar, but I kept framing it as a game. And I kept imagining myself purely as a fan of that character, which is not hard to do.”

Garfield said he made himself comfortable by asking himself what he would want if he were on the outside.

“I placed myself in that position of, ‘Well, what would I want to know?” he explained. “Would I want to be toyed with? Would I want to be lied to? Would I want to be kept on my toes guessing? Would I want to discover it when I went to the theatre? Would I want to be guessing, guessing, guessing?’ I would want the actor to do an incredibly good job at convincing me he wasn’t in it. And then I would want to lose my mind in the theatre when my instinct was proven right. That’s what I would want.”