Tomei said she was “more focused on [her] deal” than learning character specifics during contract negotiations.
You know when a Hollywood studio approaches you to play a character in their superhero franchise, and you are so blinded by the staggering amount of money they offer that you immediately say “hell yes” before researching said character? Well Marisa Tomei, whom Marvel tapped to play Aunt May Spider-Man: Homecoming, does too. And in a new interview, the Oscar-winning actress, 52, was refreshingly candid about her decision to play the character—despite the fact that Aunt May was introduced in the 1960s as Peter Parker’s arthritic aunt with glasses, silver-haired bun, and hunched back.
In a piece that ran Friday, David Itzkoff of the New York Times asked Tomei, “How did you feel when you learned who Aunt May was and how she was depicted in the comics?”
“I was horrified,” the actress responded. “Talk about crushed . . . I went through the whole negotiation without knowing. They just kept saying ‘an iconic character, an iconic character.’ It sounds kind of ridiculous, but it all happened very quickly . . .I was more focused on my deal, honestly. And then, the illustration was revealed to me.”
Hollywood is famously ageist—and the casting plight of actresses any age, especially over 40, is notoriously difficult. So you can’t fault Tomei for jumping at the opportunity without launching a cursory Google Image search to check out the character’s backstory or brittle bones—a decidedly different iteration of Aunt May than Tomei turned in. (Indeed, co-producer Eric Hauserman Carroll has said that the creative team was looking for more of a “big sister” or someone closer in age to Peter Parker in the casting process.)
“There’s nothing wrong with that depiction of the character,” Tomei rationalized of Elder Aunt May, who was more of a dowdy grandma type than the kind of svelte aunt some of Peter’s friends might find kinda hot. “I don’t want to be coming from an ageist point of view about that, at all,” Tomei backpedaled a bit, before hitting the gas again. “It was my own personal cross to bear at that moment. But in the scope of things, why not?”
Tomei even gamely considered going “full-on silver hair” for the part but ultimately she and the studio came to a compromise: “Instead, we gave her long hair.”
Tomei is not the first actress to de-age Aunt May. Before her, Sally Field, at 66, made her screen debut as another brunette Aunt May to Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker. Before Fields, Rosemary Harris, at 75 and in her elegant platinum-gray glory, made her Aunt May screen debut opposite Tobey Maguire’s Spidey.
Last month, Tomei reiterated that she did not know much about Aunt May’s backstory when she joined the Marvel-verse. In June, she told The Guardian, “It’s lucky I didn’t know much about Aunt May, because I might have been horrified if I’d seen the original image of a gray-haired pensioner. Don’t toy with my heart, Marvel. Is that really how you view me?”
In the same interview, she argued that aging Aunt May down made sense given Peter Parker’s youth in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
“They aged Peter Parker down too,” Tomei rationalized of the character, this time played by Tom Holland. “He’s 15 in this movie. I ended up picking the brains of my brother Adam, who’s been an encyclopedia of Marvel since we were little, and he explained that May’s not related to Peter by blood—she’s his aunt by marriage to his uncle Ben. So she could be elderly or pretty young, depending what age she met her husband.”
