Highlights
- Andrew Garfield told Entertainment Weekly he still believes Spider-Man could be gay, 13 years after first saying it.
- Garfield wants Peter Parker’s love interest to be a man, an idea he first floated back in 2013 to Sony.
- The comics already have a gay Spider-person. Live-action Spidey has stayed exclusively straight so far.
Andrew Garfield is still not over the gay Spider-Man idea. Neither, apparently, is anyone else.
The actor sat down with Entertainment Weekly this week to promote his new Paul Greengrass drama, The Uprising. Somehow the conversation looped back to 2013, and Garfield didn’t dodge it.
Garfield, 43, played Peter Parker in 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man and its 2014 sequel before Tom Holland took over. He briefly reprised the role in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Back then, during the press tour for The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Garfield told EW he’d pitched gender-swapping Mary Jane to a producer. “What if MJ is a dude?” he recalled asking. His casting fantasy: Michael B. Jordan. “I’ve been obsessed with him since The Wire,” he said.
He kept going. “Why can’t he be into boys?” Garfield asked at the time, a line the internet has never let him live down.
The comments made headlines then, too, and reportedly got him pressure from the studio to walk them back. Garfield has since said as much, telling The Independent in 2021 that he was leaned on to apologize for airing what he considered a legitimate idea.
There’s also a leaked-document wrinkle. Sony emails published via WikiLeaks and first reported by Gawker included a list of “character integrity obligations” from Marvel, guidelines that reportedly would have blocked Garfield’s whole pitch outright.
None of that has aged him out of the argument. “It was an exercise in rebellion that I felt passionate about,” Garfield told EW this week. “I just still believe that anyone can be in that suit.”
He’s also gotten more philosophical about why. “You don’t see skin color, you don’t see gender, you don’t see sexuality,” he said, describing what makes the character universal. “Anyone can project themselves into that suit.”
And in case anyone wants to accuse him of overthinking a fictional web-slinger’s love life, Garfield’s got a preemptive clapback ready. “You’ll be telling on yourself if you have a strong opinion either way,” he said.
Fair point, honestly. Getting mad about a hypothetical gay Spider-Man says a lot more about the mad person than it does about Spider-Man.
Here’s the thing Sony still hasn’t caught up to: the comics already did this. Web-Weaver, an openly gay Spider-person, has existed on the page since 2022’s Edge of Spider-Verse. Live-action Spidey remains stubbornly, exclusively straight across every timeline Marvel and Sony have cooked up.
Meanwhile, Shailene Woodley, who was actually cast as Garfield’s MJ before her scenes got cut from Amazing Spider-Man 2 entirely, just resurfaced with her own memories of getting axed. Small universe. Small, extremely straight universe.
Garfield isn’t pitching a specific reboot or a specific ship here. He’s making the same argument he made in 2013, just with thirteen more years of receipts: the mask doesn’t care who’s under it. Sony clearly does.
Until that changes, Garfield’s stuck doing what he’s always done: showing up to press tours for completely unrelated movies and somehow making Spider-Man’s sexuality the headline anyway.
