Marisa Tomei regrets playing ‘Aunt May’

Actor Marisa Tomei has expressed regret for deciding to play maternal characters on screen, suggesting that it might have typecast her. Tomei played Aunt May to Peter Parker in Captain America: Civil War.

In a discussion with Collider, when she was asked about playing maternal characters in Spider-Man and her recent release, The King of Staten Island, Tomei said, "I really regret starting down this road, and I really regret starting to do that. I was, you know, talked into it – not this, but I mean just that change – and I really always felt like, 'Oh, I could play a lot of things.' Honestly, it's probably more of a stretch than other things. But, it's – yeah, I guess I said it all."

She continued, "I think every actor and actress has a lot of dimensions to them, and if the scope of what is being written and being made is narrow, and you want to keep working, you do what you can. I mean, I do. I tried it. It was maybe not the right road, but you know, I do try to make the most of it."

Tomei isn't the only actor who's played Aunt May and also lived to regret it. For different reasons, actor Sally Field, who played the character in Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man films, said she didn't even especially like the movies and didn't put a 'great deal' of effort in her performance.

She told Howard Stern that she did the films as a favour to her producer friend Laura Ziskin, who had been diagnosed with cancer. "My friend Laura Ziskin was the producer, and we knew it would be her last film, and she was my first producing partner, and she was a spectacular human," Field said, adding, "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 sh*t in a five pound bag."