While on The Howard Stern Show Tuesday, Sally Field was surprisingly honest about her experience playing Aunt May in The Amazing Spider-Man. After being asked by Stern if she “didn’t like that movie,” Field admitted that she wasn’t a huge fan and explained that she took the role to collaborate a final time with her friend, producer Laura Ziskin (Ziskin died from breast cancer in 2011, a few months after filming on The Amazing Spider-Man ended).
Here’s a transcript, via Vulture:
It’s not my kind of movie. But my friend Laura Ziskin was the producer, and we knew it would be her last film, and she was my first producing partner, and she was a spectacular human.” [Ziskin died in 2011.] Stern asked how much thought Field put into the character. “Not a great deal. […] It’s really hard to find a three-dimensional character in it, and you work it as much as you can, but you can’t put ten pounds of sh*t in a five-pound bag.
If you listen to the full clip above, Fields goes on to say that she did love working with Andrew Garfield, and Stern likens the Aunt May part to the thankless, just-there-to-provide-emotional-support-for-the-male-hero role often fulfilled by a wife character in movies.
It’s interesting to hear a little bit about what was going on behind the scenes for Fields on The Amazing Spider-Man, and it’s a shame that she didn’t feel more emotionally fulfilled by the role. It’s absolutely possible for Aunt May to be written as more than Peter’s long-suffering support system, and, with Marvel’s surprising casting of Marissa Tomei as Aunt May, I’ll be very curious to see if the next Spider-Man film avoids that trap.
(via Uproxx)
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