Every once in a while, a reporter asks an actor or a director a question and is surprised by the response. Perhaps it’s because the response is an honest reaction to a surprise question, which might have happened when Flicks and the City (via Bleeding Cool) asked Breathe In and Like Crazy star Felicity Jones about playing Felicia Hardy – aka Black Cat – in Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man. Watch the above clip. Is she throwing misdirections? Does she not know who she is playing in the sequel? How do you interpret her answer, which begins somewhere around the 1:30 mark?
The way I see it is this: She either pauses and considers her answer because she knows her role hasn’t yet been confirmed, or she pauses and considers her answer because the reporter is wrong, and Jones isn’t sure how to correct her without stirring the pot even further. It’s a lose-lose situation, and she handles it well because she gives us nothing … which won’t stop us from speculating that we might soon see the indie actress looking like this on screen:
We’re thinking long term about Spider-Man casting because Sony took a major step toward laying extensive groundwork on this franchise by carving out release dates for parts three and four, which will keep us up to our ears in Spider-Man movies through 2018. That means casting character actors in parts like Black Cat, Rhino (Paul Giamatti), Electro (Jamie Foxx), Mary Jane Watson (Shailene Woodley), Harry (Dane DeHaan) and Norman Osborn (Chris Cooper) doesn’t mean everyone has to be crammed into The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which opens next summer. It means Sony can keep this stellar ensemble at its fingertips and plan accordingly as to when key villains like Cat or Rhino play a significant part. We have at LEAST three Spider-Man sequels that need to be populated with iconic figures from the Spider-Man universe, and nabbing Jones helps a lot.
So in the short term, we need to focus on The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which Webb wants to have in theaters on May 2, 2014. And while most of the set photos that we’ve seen have focused on Giamatti and Foxx, it appears – based on her response – that Jones has finished her bit of filming (while keeping it very much under the radar). This means that she could be kept in the background of the immediate Spider-Man sequel, as I believe we’re going to have to deal primarily with Electro and the creation of Osborn’s antagonist character, The Green Goblin. If I were to speculate, I’d say that the movie opens with a big action sequence involving Spidey and an already created Rhino. Then Electro and the Green Goblin will eat up the bulk of Webb’s movie, though there will be plenty of foreshadowing to future villains … likely The Sinister Six. Am I way off? Possibly. And Jones possibly is playing Black Cat at some point down the line. Isn’t this fun?
