Shailene Woodley has opened up about a little seen chapter of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, revealing that she filmed three scenes as Mary Jane Watson before her role was removed from the final movie.
Woodley discussed the experience during a recent SAG-AFTRA Foundation Conversations interview.
She said being cast as Mary Jane was especially exciting because Spider-Man had been her favorite superhero and Mary Jane had been one of her favorite characters while growing up.
The actress said she completed three scenes with Garfield, who played Peter Parker in the film series. She later received a phone call informing her that she would no longer appear in the finished movie.
According to Woodley, the explanation she received was that the film had already introduced several characters and the filmmakers wanted to continue focusing on the relationship between Garfield’s Peter Parker and Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy.
The decision was apparently connected to a possible future storyline. Woodley recalled being told that the production could wait to introduce Mary Jane until after Gwen Stacy’s death. That plan became irrelevant when the next planned film in Garfield’s Spider-Man series was not made.
Woodley remains somewhat amused by how long she has been careful about discussing the situation. More than a decade after the film’s release, she joked that she was still worried about what she was allowed to reveal.
Importantly, Woodley did not claim to know the complete reason her scenes were removed. She even joked that her performance might have been the problem and that the filmmakers could have decided it did not work.
That uncertainty makes her account different from a definitive explanation of the studio’s decision. What is confirmed from her comments is that she was cast, filmed material and later learned that her scenes had been excluded.
Garfield’s Spider-Man Future
Although Garfield’s planned third movie was shelved, his version of Peter Parker eventually returned in Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021, where he appeared alongside Tom Holland and Tobey Maguire.
Garfield has also left the door open to another return under the right circumstances. He has said a future Spider-Man project would need to be highly unconventional and creatively unexpected.
For fans, Woodley’s comments offer a glimpse at a Spider-Man storyline that was filmed but never became part of the finished movie leaving her version of Mary Jane as an unseen piece of the franchise’s history.
