Shailene Woodley made it onto the set of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 as Mary Jane Watson. What she never made it into was the finished movie.
Woodley revisited the abandoned role during a recent SAG-AFTRA Foundation career retrospective, recalling that Mary Jane had been a dream casting because Spider-Man was her favorite superhero and MJ her favorite character growing up. She said she filmed roughly three scenes with Andrew Garfield before learning about a year later that all of them had been removed.
According to Woodley, filmmakers told her the sequel was already introducing numerous characters and that bringing another potential love interest into Peter Parker’s life would complicate the story with Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy.
She remembers being told the plan was to wait until after Gwen’s death and introduce Mary Jane properly in the next movie. That next movie never happened.
She Learned About the Cut Roughly a Year After Filming
Woodley remembered the news arriving long after she had finished her brief stint on the movie. “We filmed like three scenes together, me and Andrew Garfield,” she said, before recalling being told about a year later, “So, you’re not in the movie anymore.”
That was especially jarring because the role had meant something to her before she ever stepped onto the set. Woodley said Spider-Man had been her favorite superhero growing up and Mary Jane her favorite character, making the casting one of the jobs she was most excited to receive.
The role also came to her differently from many of her earlier parts. Woodley said she did not audition in the traditional sense. She met with director Marc Webb and was subsequently cast. She remembered finding that new stage of her career somewhat unsettling because she was accustomed to proving herself through auditions.
Woodley spent three days shooting the role in early 2013 and was photographed on location in New York with her hair dyed red for Mary Jane. By June of that year, however, Sony confirmed that the character would no longer appear in the sequel.
The Plan Was to Introduce Mary Jane After Gwen Stacy’s Death
Woodley said the explanation she received centered on Peter’s relationship with Gwen. Filmmakers believed introducing another potential romantic interest before Gwen’s story had reached its conclusion could distract from the relationship at the center of the sequel.
“Let’s wait for her to die, and then we’ll introduce Mary Jane,” Woodley recalled being told, according to Deadline. She said the reasoning made sense to her at the time because it appeared Mary Jane would simply be held for the planned third installment.
Woodley nevertheless left room for a less flattering explanation, joking that perhaps her performance simply had not worked. “Who knows what the truth is?” she said before suggesting, self-deprecatingly, that producers could have decided she was terrible. Woodley said then that she was disappointed but understood the proposed story and the decision to delay Mary Jane until the next movie.
The Movie Already Had More Story Than It Could Handle
Woodley’s recollection fits the explanation Webb and the movie’s producers gave publicly at the time. Webb said in June 2013 that removing Mary Jane was a creative decision intended to streamline the movie and keep its attention on Peter and Gwen.
He became more specific before the film’s release in 2014. Webb said one Woodley scene introduced Mary Jane as Peter’s new neighbor, while another involved a brief interaction between Gwen and MJ. Even those moments, he concluded, shifted too much attention away from the Peter-Gwen relationship.
Producer Matt Tolmach later acknowledged a broader story problem. At the movie’s 2014 New York premiere, he said the production began with a 148-page screenplay and eventually realized it had “bit off more story than we could tell.”
The finished sequel was already balancing Peter and Gwen’s relationship with Jamie Foxx’s Electro, Dane DeHaan’s Harry Osborn, Paul Giamatti’s Rhino and several storylines intended to build Sony’s larger Spider-Man franchise.
The Third Movie Never Gave Woodley’s Mary Jane Another Chance
The ending of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 created the opening filmmakers had described to Woodley: Gwen dies, leaving Peter devastated and potentially setting up Mary Jane’s arrival in a later installment.
Sony had already announced plans for The Amazing Spider-Man 3 and a fourth movie when Woodley’s scenes were cut. Contemporary reporting, however, also raised questions about whether Woodley herself would return because her growing Divergent commitments could have created scheduling problems.
The planned third Garfield movie was ultimately abandoned as Sony changed course with the franchise. Garfield later returned as Peter Parker in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, but Woodley’s version of Mary Jane never received the follow-up for which her introduction had supposedly been saved.
Her footage did not get a second life on the home-video release either. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 arrived on Blu-ray with multiple deleted scenes, but Woodley’s Mary Jane material was not among them.