A lot of kids dream of growing up and being Spider-Man, but only a select few get to live the dream. Tom Holland, Tobey Maguire, Shameik Moore, and Andrew Garfield are probably the best-known Spider-Man actors but did you know Garfield had competition for the role?
Joe Jonas from the Jonas Brothers auditioned to play Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man movies. Unfortunately, Jonas lost the superhero movie to Garfield. Still, Jonas has never really gotten over missing out on playing the Wallcrawler, as he told Variety recently.
“I remember years ago I was up for Spider-Man and I was so, so excited and it was the year Andrew Garfield got it,” he explained. “Obviously, he was the right one. But I remember that was a big thing at the time, going back for callbacks and the director used to be a music video director. So I was like, “I got an in here.” But you know what? I love the process of auditioning and putting yourself out there and having to prove yourself.”
Of course, in the end, it all worked out for Jonas. The Amazing Spider-Man movies were about as popular as a garden spider crawling across a living room floor. While they’re perfectly OK action movies, they definitely lacked the magic of Raimi’s trilogy. So much so that Sony ended up cancelling the third film in the trilogy before shooting began.
Still, the recent MCU movie No Way Home brought back Garfield’s version of the character to give Peter 3 a little bit of closure on his story arc (Editor: justice for Gwen). If you love the Wallcrawler, check out our guide to the best Spider-Man villains, or if you’re sick of spiders, we have an article all about Ant-Man 3.