The packed history of superhero cinema in the 21st century is full of a lot of near-misses: Actors rumored to play roles, or who got different jobs than the ones they were supposedly getting, or—in extreme cases like Mahershala Ali’s Blade movie—getting announced in a big, flashy press conference to be making a movie that then ultimately evaporates. Still, the collection of actors who’ve actually been put in an iconic comic book part, showed up on set, filmed their scenes, and then got cut from the canon is pretty small—which might explain why Shailene Woodley is still pretty bummed about it, a decade after the fact.
Per Variety, the Divergent series star was talking at a SAG-AFTRA event when her brief (bordering on non-existent) tenure in the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies came up. Woodley was famously cast as Mary Jane Watson in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 back in 2013, including filming scenes with Garfield. But the character was ultimately cut from the movie, to better focus on the relationship between Garfield’s Peter Parker and Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy. (Given how that film ends, and how generally well-received Stone’s performance in those movies was, we suspect producers may have made the right call; Woodley would have been setting herself up for some pretty peak 2010s internet dogpiling.) Still, she sounds pretty miffed about it, even to this day: “That was a fun phone call,” she said of getting the news—a year after filming was finished— that she just straight-up wasn’t in the movie anymore, adding that she’d been especially excited 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.'”
At the time, Woodley was told they’d save her debut for a straighter introduction in The Amazing Spider-Man 3, which, of course, wound up not happening. (The deal Sony and Marvel put together in 2015 to get Spider-Man into the MCU killed the franchise, although Garfield reprised his role as The Saddest Peter in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home.) As for Woodley, she admits there could have been other reasons her Mary Jane was cut. Noting that producers made public statements that shoe-horning a second love interest into Amazing 2 proved extremely unwieldy, she added, “Well, that’s what I was told, you know. But again, who knows what the truth is. I could have been terrible and they’re like, ‘We can’t do this.’”
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