It’s a good week for celebrities sincerely not giving a shit about the beloved franchises in which they appear. Hot on the heels of Ian McShane applying his own leathery brand of calculus to HBO’s Game Of Thrones and coming up with “tits and dragons” as the series’ core components, Sally Field has gone on The Howard Stern Show to discuss her ambivalence towards appearing as Aunt May in The Amazing Spider-Man and its 2014 sequel.
“It’s not my kind of movie,” the Hello, My Name Is Doris actress diplomatically told Stern, explaining that she only took the job in order to work one more time with her friend, producer Laura Ziskin. (Ziskin died in 2011.) As to the role of May Parker, a woman whose basic existence is devoted to stopping the world’s most beloved wisecracking superhero from having any fun, Field wasn’t much more complimentary: “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 shit in a five-pound bag.”
Given how often genre performers seem to delight in kissing up to their nerdy fans by expressing their inexplicable love of, say, Gambit, it’s refreshing to see another actor step up and say that they really don’t given a damn about the rich internal life of a character whose only notable features are her constantly wringing hands. In fact, it’s the kind of folksy, straight-shooting honesty we think we could really get behind in this fractious election year. Hell, the campaign slogan pretty much writes itself: