Zendaya Reveals She Didn’t Know She Was Auditioning for MJ In Spider-Man

Zendaya recently revealed to GQ that she had no idea she was auditioning for MJ when she read for a role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, explaining that while she figured out it was for a Spider-Man movie, she was not told ahead of time what the role was.

“We weren’t supposed to know that the script pages that we were reading were for Spider-Man, but I did find out that it was for Spider-Man cause I have good agents. But I didn’t know what role I was auditioning for. I just thought it was ‘girl in Spider-Man movie.’ I didn’t really know what character, or what kind of character, they would be. Right before the screen test, they were kind of saying okay these are the characters that we’re reading for, MJ being one of them and I was like “oh that would be so cool!”

She also noted that she turned down many roles in 2020 because she wanted to play characters that weren’t one-dimensional and just serve as an accessory to one of the male characters. It should be interesting to see how this impacts her role in the upcoming third Spider-Man movie.

“It’s not necessarily that any of [the scripts] were bad or something like that. I just felt like a lot of the roles that I was reading, specifically female roles, were just like, I could have played them all as the same person and it wouldn’t have mattered, if that makes sense. The best way to describe it is just like, they’d usually serve the purpose of helping the male character get to where they need to go, do what they need to do. They don’t really have an arc of their own. And they usually feel very one-dimensional in the sense that there’s not a lot of layers to them, meaning they all seem very kind of like the same person over and over and over again. It would have been great and it would have been fine, but I wouldn’t have grown at all.”