Shailene Woodley shared insight into why her performance as Mary Jane Watson didn’t make it into the final cut of “The Amazing Spider-Man 2,” revealing she learned the news a year after filming her scenes with Andrew Garfield.
Woodley addressed being cut from the superhero movie for the “SAG-AFTRA Foundation Conversations” series, where she confirmed – 13 years after she was photographed onset as the comic book character – that she did shoot scenes with Garfield’s Peter Parker/Spider-Man. Yet, she indicated that they’re unlikely to see the light of day.
“That was a fun phone call,” she recalled. “I was cast as Mary Jane for ‘Spider-Man,’ which was my dream because … Spider-Man’s my favorite superhero. Mary Jane was my favorite character growing up. So, when I got it, I was like, ‘This is so exciting.’”
Per Woodley, she and Garfield filmed “three scenes” together, but that she was given the bad news a year later.
“And then like a year later, they were like, ‘So, you’re not in the movie anymore,’” she said. “And I was like, ‘What? What do you mean?’ And they were like, ‘We’ve introduced a lot of new characters in this last one, and we’re going to wait for whatever happens between [Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy] and Andrew.”
Woodley then poked fun at herself for trying to stay spoiler-free for a movie that came out in 2014, adding, “I’m so paranoid. All of these years of what I’m allowed to say or not allowed to say, I’m like, ‘It’s been out for over 10 years, Shailene.’”
“Whatever. They were like, ‘Let’s wait for her to die and then we’ll introduce Mary Jane,’” she said “[It] made sense. But then they didn’t make that film.”
Though, Woodley acknowledged that this was what she was told, quipping, “But again, who knows what the truth is. I could have been terrible and they’re like, ‘We can’t do this.’”
Watch Woodley’s comments below.
While Garfield’s planned third “Spider-Man” movies was ultimately shelved, he has since returned to the character, appearing in 2021’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home” opposite Tom Holland and fellow Spider-Man/Peter Parker Tobey Maguire.
And he hasn’t ruled out another return, either. In August, Garfield shared that he’d be open to putting the suit back on if the script was “very, very odd.”
“I would need it to be very strange, and I would need it to be completely unconventional and almost — I wouldn’t say boring — but I would want it to be just completely unexpected, like a genre of Spider-Man that you’ve never seen before, that feels very left field,” he said.
