So yeah, about those reports that Zendaya’s mysterious character in next year’s Spider-Man: Homecoming is iconic Spidey love interest Mary Jane Watson? Zendaya says you should hold your horses. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the Disney Channel alumna said you shouldn’t believe everything you read:
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.
Of course, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that she’s playing a character who’s some kind of riff on the Mary Jane concept. But even that seems less likely. When she was asked whether her character is romantically involved with the wall-crawler’s alter ego, Peter Parker, she laughed and said, “No.†Maybe they’ll just hook up in the next movie (presumably entitled Spider-Man: Prom)?
The mononymous 20-year-old also took aim at the small cadre of geeks who were upset about the potential that a woman of color might be playing Mary Jane:
But of course there’s going to be outrage over that because for some reason some people just aren’t ready. I’m like, “I don’t know what America you live in, but from what I see when I walk outside my streets of New York right now, I see lots of diversity and I see the real world and it’s beautiful, and that’s what should be reflected and that’s what is reflected so you’re just going to have to get over it.â€