Andrew Garfield has had 13 years to reconsider the idea that once turned an Amazing Spider-Man press tour into a conversation about the superhero’s sexuality. He has not changed his mind.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly ahead of his new film The Uprising, Garfield revisited his 2013 comments questioning why Peter Parker could not explore an attraction to men. He now describes the original suggestion as an “exercise in rebellion” that he genuinely cared about.
His current position is broader than choosing a particular love interest for Peter. Garfield said Spider-Man works because the costume allows people to project themselves behind the mask without first seeing skin color, gender or sexuality. “I just still believe that anyone can be in that suit,” he said.
That idea has followed Garfield since he was preparing to return as Peter in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Back then, he went considerably further than making a general argument for representation, he wondered publicly why Peter could not be attracted to men and floated Michael B. Jordan as a possible male version of MJ.
Garfield Says the Mask Lets Anyone Imagine Being Spider-Man
Garfield described Spider-Man as one of fiction’s most universally recognizable characters and tied that appeal directly to the costume. Because the hero is covered from head to toe, he argued, audiences are not immediately confronted with the race, gender or sexuality of the person underneath.
He told EW that he likes the idea of a fictional world in which different kinds of people can see themselves represented, calling his original question an act of asking, essentially, why not.
Garfield said something similar during the original 2013 discussion. At Comic-Con, he explained that abruptly changing the established romantic identity of the Peter Parker he was already playing would not necessarily have worked dramatically, while maintaining that Spider-Man as a larger idea could represent people of different races, genders and sexual orientations.
He First Floated a Male MJ and Michael B. Jordan in 2013
Garfield’s original comments appeared in a 2013 Entertainment Weekly interview. He recalled talking with producer Matt Tolmach about Mary Jane Watson and asking what would happen if MJ were a man and Peter were given room to explore his sexuality.
Michael B. Jordan was his proposed casting choice. Garfield said he had admired Jordan since The Wire and suggested that pairing him with Peter could introduce both same-sex attraction and an interracial relationship into the story.
Garfield addressed the reaction again at Comic-Con days later. He clarified that the Michael B. Jordan suggestion had been partly tongue-in-cheek, but the larger principle was not, Spider-Man, in his view, belonged to people far beyond one demographic.
He returned to the subject in 2015 while promoting 99 Homes. Garfield told Mic that he hoped audiences would eventually reach a point where a pansexual Spider-Man could exist without requiring a major debate, again pointing to the full-body costume as part of the character’s universal appeal.
Marvel Has Since Introduced a Gay Spider-Hero in the Comics
A live-action Peter Parker has still not been portrayed as gay, but the larger Spider-Verse has expanded since Garfield first raised the question. Marvel introduced Web-Weaver, Cooper Coen, in Edge of Spider-Verse #5 in 2022.
Web-Weaver is a gay Spider-hero from an alternate universe with a fashion background, rather than a rewritten version of the traditional Peter Parker.
The franchise has broadened the identity behind the mask in other ways through characters including Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy, particularly in the animated Spider-Verse films. Garfield himself returned as his version of Peter alongside Tobey Maguire and Tom Holland in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home.