Earlier this week we found out that Andrew Garfield was playing Spider-Man in Sony’s reboot of the franchise.
We knew that there were several actors in contention for the role, and that screen tests were happening with some of them. Now we know exactly who, as the guys at The Wrap have published the very short list of actors whose screen tests actually made it to the top brass at Sony, and in case you care, along with Garfield, the other actors in consideration were Jamie Bell and Alden Ehrenreich.
In and of itself this is utterly uninteresting. We knew Bell was up for the role, and, frankly, knowing who was really, really close to getting playing Peter Parker, but didn’t get the job is about as newsworthy as finding out that Marc Webb is planning to do his laundry on Monday.
Of course, when you add some context to the information it actually becomes quite fascinating.
When the story of Garfield’s casting broke, Drew McWeeny at HitFix wrote:
“What we’re hearing now though is that Parker starts the series as a college student, and that makes more sense with this casting.”
He doesn’t attribute the information to a source, but given how well connected McWeeny is, it’s pretty safe to assume that the information is bona fide.
More to the point, the three candidates Sony were looking at for the role of Spidey were all at the older end of the age spectrum, with Ehrenreich the youngest at 20, and the other two closer to 30 than 18. If Sony were seriously considering a series of films where Peter Parker is in high school, actors in their twenties, even baby-faced ones would be a terrible mistake, so exclusively screen testing older actors gives a lot of credence to the ‘talk’ that the film is set during Peter Parker’s college years.
What would be really interesting would be seeing the screen tests, it would be great to know what Garfield had that Bell didn’t, particularly as a few days ago we all thought the role was Bell’s. Ordinarily I’d assume that this footage would be safely under lock and key, but given how leaky the project has been so far, I’m guessing we’ll see at least one of the tapes in the next few weeks, if not sooner.
