While 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home was filled with cameos, Kirsten Dunst wishes she could have joined in on the superhero fun.
In a recent interview with British GQ, Dunst, 41, revealed that she wasn’t asked to reprise her role as Mary Jane Watson from director Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man franchise for No Way Home. “No, no. I would have,” she shared on Tuesday, April 2.
Dunst made her debut as Peter Parker/Spider-Man’s (Tobey Maguire) friend-turned-love interest in 2002’s Spider-Man. The action film spawned two sequels, 2004’s Spider-Man 2 and 2007’s Spider-Man 3. A fourth installment was eventually scrapped to make way for the 2012 reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man, starring Andrew Garfield in the titular role.
Tom Holland brought Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. No Way Home marked the actor’s third solo Spider-Man film and featured the return of Maguire and Garfield’s versions of the character, as well as villains from their previous films, including Willem Dafoe as the Green Goblin and Jamie Foxx as Electro.
Though Dunst did not appear in the movie, Maguire’s Peter Parker made reference to Mary Jane while discussing his love life with Garfield’s version of the hero.
In her British GQ interview, Dunst noted that working on the original Spider-Man film felt “innocent” compared to the grand scale of superhero movies today. “Sam Raimi was like a cult director, so it felt like we were making an indie disguised as a superhero film,” she explained.
Dunst also teased that she would be interested in revisiting Peter and Mary Jane’s relationship onscreen with Maguire, 48. “It would be funny to be like, ‘OK, let’s take Tobey and I and do it in a weird indie way where it’s like a different kind of superhero film,’” she told the outlet. “Like how they did that movie Chronicle. It could be cool.”
Earlier this week, Raimi, 64, addressed speculation about whether a fourth Spider-Man movie starring Maguire is in the works. “Well, I haven’t heard about that yet,” he told CBR at WonderCon in Anaheim, California. “I did read that, but I’m not actually working on it yet. I mean, Marvel and Columbia are so successful with current Spider-Man [movies], and the track there, and I don’t know that they’re going to go back to me, and say, ‘Well, folks, we can also tell that story!’”
Maguire, for his part, has previously expressed his desire to put on his Spidey suit one more time. “I love these films and I love all of the different series,” he told Marvel.com in January 2023. “If these guys called me and said, ‘Would you show up tonight to hang out and goof around?’ or ‘Would you show up to do this movie or read a scene or do a Spider-Man thing?’ it would be a ‘Yes!’ Because why wouldn’t I want to do that?”
While a fourth Maguire Spider-Man movie has not been confirmed, Holland, 27, is expected to return for an upcoming fourth MCU solo outing. No Way Home ended on a bittersweet note, as Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) cast a spell to erase Peter from people’s memories in order to prevent the multiverse from collapsing.
Holland told the Critics Choice Association in December 2023 that he would only make another Spider-Man film if it did “justice” to the character.
“I feel very, very lucky that we were able to work on a franchise that got better with each movie, that got more successful with each movie, which I think is really rare, and I want to protect his legacy,” he said at the time. “So, I won’t make another one for the sake of making another one. It will have to be worth the while of the character.”
