The classmate who noticed everything and said very little, until she worked out who her friend was on her own.
MJ is Zendaya’s character in the Spider-Man films, and she is not Mary Jane Watson. She is an original character, written as a nod to the comics’ Mary Jane: her name is Michelle Jones, the initials are the joke, and it took the films three entries to admit that her full surname is Jones-Watson, in a line where she also says she goes by Michelle Jones. Zendaya was clear about it from the start, saying she was “100% Michelle” while the internet insisted otherwise.
In Homecoming she is the smart, snarky classmate at the back of the room. In Far From Home she is the girl Peter is trying to tell, who has already worked it out. In No Way Home she is in the fight. Zendaya won the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress for the second of those, and the reviews across all three have been positive in a way the films’ supporting cast does not always get.
Minor spoiler
No Way Home ends with a spell that erases the world’s memory of Peter Parker, and her with it. Brand New Day finds her four years on, graduated from MIT, sharing an apartment in New York with Ned, and with a new boyfriend. Peter turns up at the housewarming pretending to be a neighbour, and leaves when he sees her with someone else.
Then Jean Grey, a telepath at war with Peter, takes control of MJ’s mind and walks her off a rooftop. Peter catches her, hides her at Frank Castle’s, and tells her what she has forgotten. She helps him build two power inhibitors, finds the letter he wrote her and Ned explaining the spell, and confronts him. He tells her he loves her. She says she is sorry, that she really has no memory of him, and that she cannot return it. The film ends with her on the roof of their old school, turning over the black dahlia necklace he gave her, and does not tell you what she decides.
Show detailsThe casting
When Zendaya, an African American actress, was cast, speculation that she would be playing Mary Jane Watson produced a wave of complaint. James Gunn and Mary Jane’s co-creator Stan Lee both defended the casting publicly. Zendaya’s own answer, to The Hollywood Reporter, was that the people upset by it were “just going to have to get over it”, and the films then made the whole argument moot by giving her a different character. Zendaya has said she worked with the writers on Brand New Day to keep the character’s “quirks” after an early draft made her too “normal”.