Shailene Woodley says she was devastated when her Mary Jane scenes were cut from The Amazing Spider-Man 2, ending what she called a childhood dream role years later.
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Shailene Woodley has revealed that she was “crushed” after learning that her scenes as Mary Jane Watson had been removed from The Amazing Spider-Man 2, more than a year after filming.
Speaking in a recent SAG-AFTRA Foundation Conversations interview, Woodley recalled the disappointment of discovering that the role she had long dreamed of playing would not make it into the 2014 superhero film starring Andrew Garfield.
Woodley said being cast by director Marc Webb as Mary Jane was especially meaningful because Spider-Man had been her favorite superhero while growing up and Mary Jane was her favorite character.
She described landing the role as a dream come true.
Woodley said she filmed around three scenes with Garfield before receiving an unexpected call roughly a year later informing her that she would no longer appear in the movie.
“That was a fun phone call,” she recalled sarcastically.
According to Woodley, the filmmakers explained that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 had introduced several new characters and that they wanted to focus first on the relationship between Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy, played by Emma Stone.
She said she was told the plan was to introduce Mary Jane after Gwen Stacy’s storyline had concluded.
“That made sense,” Woodley said, adding that the next film in the planned storyline was ultimately never made.
The decision to cut Mary Jane reportedly stemmed from concerns that introducing another potential love interest could make the story too crowded or confusing. Woodley said that was the explanation she received, although she joked that she could simply have been terrible in the role.
“Who knows what the truth is,” she said.
At the time of the film’s release, producer Matt Tolmach told Variety that the creative team had taken on more story than could fit into the final movie.
“We bit off more story than we could tell,” Tolmach said in 2014, explaining that the filmmakers had realized Mary Jane’s storyline would not fit into the film.
Woodley’s appearance as Mary Jane had been expected to set up a larger role in future installments of the Amazing Spider-Man franchise. However, Sony’s plans for the series changed after The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and the proposed continuation featuring Woodley’s character never materialized.
The role of Mary Jane Watson had previously been played by Kirsten Dunst opposite Tobey Maguire in Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man trilogy.
Woodley has since built an extensive film and television career, appearing in The Descendants, The Fault in Our Stars, the Divergent series, Big Little Lies, Dumb Money and Hulu’s Paradise.
But more than 12 years later, the lost Spider-Man role remains one of Hollywood’s most intriguing what-ifs — and, for Woodley, a reminder of how quickly even a dream role can disappear before audiences ever see
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