Pulling An Oberhauser: Zendaya’s Latest SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING Comments

Zendaya is being awfully coy about the “Are you playing Mary Jane in Spider-Man: Homecoming” question these days. I get it: she’s under contract, signed NDAs, that whole deal. Also, she’s young and maybe she didn’t see Star Trek Into Darkness, and odds are darn good she didn’t see Spectre. So she might be forgiven for following on the heels of Benedict Cumberbatch and Christoph Waltz, two LYING LIARS who LIED to the press about their characters’ respective identities.

But to those of us who saw those films, Zendaya’s song sounds p. familiar. When asked about her increasingly mysterious role by the Hollywood Reporter, Zendaya said:

“People are going to react over anything. But nothing [about who she is playing] is fact. It’s like, you guys are just making shit up at this point and then reacting to it. Whenever we were on set, one of us gets some random character name [on the call sheet]. [Bloggers were] like, ‘Oh they must be so and so.’ And we just crack up about it, because it’s like, ‘Whatever you want to think. You’ll find out.’ It’s funny to watch the guessing game.”

Well, that’s a whole lot of nothing, but what doesn’t she say here? She doesn’t say whether or not she’s playing MJ, for one. On the other hand if, as previously reported, she’s playing someone named “Michelle,” she has a point about us bloggers weaving fantasies out of nothing. I mean, that’s that, right? Well, no. As reported by this very site in August, Zendaya’s character has been called “Michelle,” but apparently also goes by the name “MJ.” As Devin mentioned in August, her “reveal” to audiences as MJ would be an updated nod to the way Mary Jane was gradually revealed in the comics.

So what if in this new canon, MJ is just MJ? She can't be playing Mary Jane if there's no Mary Jane to play. So it’s all on the up and up, except for the cheap “I’m not technically lying” tactics we saw employed in the Star Trek and Bond franchises recently. Maybe this time the real twist will be that the reveal actually works.

Other sites are reporting that the main love interest in the film will actually be Liz Allan (Laura Harrier), but come on, anyone who knows the comics could’ve told you that. Liz Allan, then Betty Brant (actually those two were kind of concurrent), then Gwen Stacy, THEN Mary Jane. Tom Holland's gonna be busy.