4. Sally Field
Let’s start by clarifying that Sally Field is an outstanding actress. She has won many awards during her career including the Academy Award for best actress in 1980 and 1985. And aside from being a scene-stealer on the big screen, she’s also a social activist who created a campaign to inform about osteoporosis, a disease she suffered from. We love Sally!
Unfortunately, not even her amazing acting skills were able to make Aunt May a standout character in The Amazing Spider-Man franchise. While Sally did the best with the few scenes that she had, May Parker had no impact at all on Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker. You could completely remove her from both Amazing Spider-Man movies and things wouldn’t change for the most part. Just think about it; what did she do? What effect did she have on the story? It feels as if Sally had barely any scenes to portray May, which resulted in a wasted casting.
The problem doesn’t reside in Sally’s abilities to portray May Parker, but rather in the character itself. It feels as if May was brought in to check a box in a list of requirements that Sony needed to fulfill so that it could create another Spider-Man film. In the first entry of Marc Webb’s saga, Aunt May was just kind of there, worrying about Peter but never really doing anything to support him. Things changed for the sequel, where she became a nursing student to earn money and sustain Peter and herself. But in a movie as crowded as The Amazing Spider-Man 2, that sub-plot was little more than noise that didn’t result in anything of importance.
Sally Field herself has expressed her frustration with playing Aunt May by saying:
"“It’s really hard to find a three dimensional character in it, and you work it as much as you can, but you can’t put ten pounds of s*** in a five pound bag.”"
If an actress herself complains about the character she’s interpreting, there’s no denying that portrayal won’t be remembered for being iconic in history books. This is one of those instances where the script fell short of the woman bringing it to life, and that’s a shame. With a franchise as divisive and critiqued as The Amazing Spider-Man, it certainly doesn’t help that it has the worst iteration of Aunt May we’ve seen so far.