It isn’t rare that someone is cut from a project but it can sting. Like when The Secret Life of the American Teenage star was taking on Marvel. Shailene Woodley was infamously cast as Mary Jane Watson in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, meant to tease a future for Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker that we never got. And the Big Little Lies star opened up about losing a dream role.
At a recent talk at SAG-AFTRA, Woodley joked about the role, saying “That was a fun phone call.” She went on to talk about how the role was one she’d been dreaming of. “I was cast as Mary Jane for Spider-Man, which was my dream. Oh my god, 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!’”
Woodley went on to talk about how she filmed three scenes as Garfield’s Mary Jane Watson and it took years before she found out that she was being cut from the film. “We filmed like three scenes together, me and Andrew Garfield. And then, like a year later, they were like, ‘So, you’re not in the movie anymore.’ And I was like, ‘What? What do you mean?’ And they’re 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] and Andrew [Garfield].’”
When was Mary Jane supposed to appear?
She was reportedly told that after Peter’s relationship with Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) “ended,” they would introduce her Mary Jane Watson. At the end of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Gwen famously dies in a moment where Peter misjudged how she would fall from a tower after a run in with Harry Osborn’s (Dane DeHaan) Green Goblin.
“They were like, ‘Let’s wait for her to die, and then we’ll introduce Mary Jane.’ Which made sense, but then they didn’t make that film. So, there was no reintroduction,” Woodley said. “That’s what I was told, but again, who knows what the truth is? I could have been terrible, and they were like, ‘We can’t do this.’”
What ended up happening was that director Marc Webb’s run with Spider-Man came to an end and a deal between the Marvel Cinematic Universe/Disney and Sony came to pass, bringing Tom Holland’s Peter Parker into the MCU only 2 years later in Captain America: Civil War. To date, Holland’s Peter is the only one to successfully lead 4 Spider-Man projects.
While Garfield’s franchise are some of the Spider-Man films to make the least amount of money at the box office, the love for his take on Peter is still there among fans. But in Garfield’s return as Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home, his “MJ” was his girlfriend Gwen. Meaning that even off screen, Peter didn’t get to meet Woodley’s MJ.
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