The Amazing Spider-Man actor Andrew Garfield is once again pushing for a gay Spider-Man, asking, “why can’t he be into boys?”
Garfield, who starred as Spider-Man in two films in 2012 and 2014, made the same point back in 2013 when he was starring in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in a viral interview where he pondered over why there had not been a gay Spider-Man already. Garfield added that he even had a discussion about the idea with producer Matt Tolmach about making Spider-Man’s love interest a male, adding that it would be easy to go from “Mary Jane” to merely “MJ.”
At the time he said the suggestion was “kind of joking, but kind of not joking about MJ… I was like, ‘What if MJ is a dude?” And he added, “Why can’t we discover that Peter is exploring his sexuality? It’s hardly even groundbreaking! … So why can’t he be gay? Why can’t he be into boys?”
In fact, Garfield claimed that he actually shopped the idea around with the hope that actor Michael B. Jordan could co-star as “M.J.” Garfield said Jorden is “so charismatic and talented. It’d be even better — we’d have interracial bisexuality!”
Now, 13 years later, Garfield is still pushing for a gay Spider-Man, according to Variety.
Garfield, who reprised his particular incarnation as the webslinger in the the 2021 superhero entry Spider-Man: No Way Home, brought up the idea again during a press tour for director Paul Greengrass’ The Uprising
“It was an exercise in rebellion that I felt passionate about,” Garfield said when asked about the idea by Entertainment Weekly. “I just still believe that anyone can be in that suit. That’s the point of why it’s such a kind of universally beloved character, one of the greatly beloved characters in the history of fiction is because you don’t see skin color, you don’t see gender, you don’t see sexuality. Anyone can project themselves into that suit.”
“I like the idea of a place where everyone is being honored and everyone is being included, and it was just a kind of act of saying, ‘Well, why not?’ And you’ll be telling on yourself if you have a strong opinion either way,” Garfield added.
Garfield is not the only star to push for diversifying Spider-Man. The current Spidey, Tom Holland, has suggested that there should be a Hispanic Spider-Man. But, at least in that case, there is actual comic book precedent for the idea as the character of Miles Morales took on the Spider-Man role in Marvel Comics in 2011. Morales is a Spider-Man from the alternate reality called the Ultimate Universe and he is from Earth 1610. The Ultimate Universe series of comics ran from 2011 to 2015, but the Morales character was popular enough for it to have been spun off into other comic book titles and even other media, including animation.
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