More than 12 years later, Shailene Woodley has opened up about her disappointment in finding out that her part in “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” opposite Andrew Garfield didn’t make the final cut.
Woodley, in a recent interview as part of the “SAG-AFTRA Foundation Conversations” series with actors about their craft, revealed that she found out a year after filming for “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” that she would not appear in the movie, which was released in theaters in May 2014.
“That was a fun phone call,” Woodley recalled.
She said that being cast as Mary Jane Watson in the movie by director Marc Webb “was my dream because I really, 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 said she 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 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 character, Gwen Stacy, who is Peter Parker’s girlfriend in the film] and Andrew.” (Spoiler: Gwen Stacy dies in “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.”)
Woodley said she was also told, “’Let’s wait for [Gwen Stacy] to die and then we’ll introduce Mary Jane.’ Which made sense. But then they didn’t make that film.”
Apparently, the filmmakers decided to axe Mary Jane from the movie because they thought it was confusing to have the character as another love interest to Peter Parker. “Well, that’s what I was told, you know,” Woodley said. “But again, who knows what the truth is. I could have been terrible and they’re like, ‘We can’t do this.’”
In 2014, at the New York premiere of “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” (which featured a Mary Jane-themed cocktail), producer Matt Tolmach told Variety this about the deletion of Woodley’s scenes: “We bit off more story than we could tell. We had a 148-page script. We were in the middle of that, and we realized this story [with Mary Jane] is not going to be in this movie.”
In Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movie trilogy, the role of Mary Jane was played by Kirsten Dunst opposite Tobey Maguire.
In Woodley’s nearly 90-minute “SAG-AFTRA Foundation Conversations” interview, she also spoke about her performances in “Divergent,” “Dumb Money,” “The Descendants,” “The Fault in Our Stars,” HBO’s “Big Little Lies” and Season 2 of Hulu’s “Paradise.”
You can watch the full interview here:
