Andrew Garfield is revisiting a question he first raised more than a decade ago, telling Entertainment Weekly he still believes Spider-Man doesn’t have to be straight and that the character’s appeal rests precisely on how open it is to interpretation.
The comments came while Garfield promoted his upcoming historical drama “The Uprising,” directed by Paul Greengrass. Asked to reflect on remarks he made in 2013 while promoting “The Amazing Spider-Man 2,” Garfield called that earlier moment “an exercise in rebellion that I felt passionate about,” adding that his underlying view hasn’t shifted. “I just still believe that anyone can be in that suit,” he said. “You don’t see skin color, you don’t see gender, you don’t see sexuality. Anyone can project themselves into that suit.”
Back in 2013, Garfield had described a conversation with producer Matt Tolmach about reimagining Peter Parker’s love interest MJ as a man, floating Michael B. Jordan for the part and calling the pairing “interracial bisexuality.” He framed the pitch at the time as only half joking, arguing that a queer storyline for Peter Parker “is hardly even groundbreaking.”
Marvel’s comics have already gone further than its films on this front. The publisher introduced Cooper Coen, a gay Spider-Man known as Web-Weaver, in a 2022 issue of “Edge of the Spider-Verse.” Sony’s animated “Spider-Verse” franchise has likewise embraced numerous alternate versions of the character across race, gender and background. But live-action Spider-Man movies, spanning Tobey Maguire, Garfield and Tom Holland, have kept Peter Parker’s romantic arcs centered on women.
Garfield’s comments arrive during a turbulent stretch professionally. Amazon dropped his OpenAI drama from Luca Guadagnino this past June, just months after the company disclosed a massive investment in the AI firm. He remains best known to franchise audiences for reprising Peter Parker in 2021’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home” alongside Maguire and Holland, though he did not appear in this year’s “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.”
