Jake Gyllenhaal is someone I personally never thought I’d see in a Marvel movie; but apparently, being in Spider-Man: Far From Home isn’t the first time the actor has dipped his toes into a Spider-Man movie. Back in the early 2000s, it was rumored that Gyllenhaal was supposed to play Peter Parker in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 as a replacement for Tobey Maguire.
According to a report by Screen Rant, Maguire was negotiating for a better contract. At one point, he refused to join the pre-production of Spider-Man 2 and Sony Pictures fired him. The studio pushed production and started looking for a new Peter Parker and Jake Gyllenhaal was on the list.
In an interview with Yahoo! Movies, Gyllenhaal said: “There are so many roles in my career where I was up against another actor, or something happened that possibly could’ve happened but didn’t happen but maybe it would have… Eventually, my belief is when an actor’s played a character, particularly in a movie, the character’s theirs, and that’s that. But yeah [Maguire] hurt himself and there was talk. And there was a slew of actors [possibly up for the part], and I was one of them.”
As we all know now, Maguire eventually got his role back after re-negotiating with Sony, and Gyllenhaal moved on to star in other films. Flash-forward to today and he’s finally in a Spider-Man film for real – not as Spider-Man himself, but as Quentin Beck a.k.a. Mysterio.
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Do you think that Jake Gyllenhaal would have made a good Spider-Man?
