The Superhero Film Sally Field Has Regrets About Filming

You may not be able to tell from a performance — ideally, you wouldn't — but most actors do not love every single movie they star in. Sometimes they join the ride because of financial reasons or because they want to take the first steps up the career ladder. Other times, they hop on board a project that ends up in production limbo or suffers from some contention among the cast or the crew.

And just like an actor may take a role based on any number of motivations, there is an array of reasons an actor may come out of a film wanting to forget it even exists. Even big names certainly have films they aren't too proud of, especially from their younger and less experienced years. That's the acting industry for you: No pain, no gain.

Beloved American star Sally Field is no exception to this struggle. The Academy Award-winning actress is known for roles such as Mrs. Gump in 1994's "Forrest Gump" and Mary Todd Lincoln in 2012's biopic "Lincoln." Despite the dozens of titles under her belt, however, Field was bound not to love every single one of her many projects — and she was pretty vocal in criticizing one in a subsequent interview.

When Field was a guest on "The Howard Stern Show" in 2016, the actress and the host talked, among other things, about the former's oft-misquoted Oscar speech, and went into a bit of detail about her political views. At one point, the conversation landed on 2012's "The Amazing Spiderman" and its 2014 sequel, which starred Andrew Garfield as the web-slinging superhero. In both films, Field played Peter Parker's Aunt May. The role in the original trilogy was interpreted by Rosemary Harris and in the later MCU films by Marisa Tomei.

To the question of whether she liked the Marc Webb-helmed film, Field graciously beat around the bush to say, "Not especially, it's not my kind of movie." When Stern nudged her a little harder, she admitted that she tried to make as much sense of the performance as she could, but it was hard to employ any kind of acting process in a role that was pretty much made to, as Stern put it, "prop up Spider-Man" and not much else.

For this reason, Field revealed, she did not put a great deal of effort into bringing the character of Aunt May to life. Without a "three-dimensional character," the work of getting into the role was uncomplicated — and not in a good way.

Even the fact that she was introducing Aunt May — and helping to reintroduce Spider-Man — to a new generation didn't "blow [her] skirts up," Field admitted candidly to Howard Stern. So why did she accept the role? Well, apparently for one good reason: friendship. The actress explained that the producer of the film was a friend of hers, Laura Ziskin. In fact, Ziskin was Field's very first producing partner. It was common knowledge among the cast and crew that this would be Ziskin's final project, and for the "spectacular human" with whom she had such a long history, Field was willing to accept the project. Ziskin died of breast cancer before the first film was released (via The New York Times), but Field carried her promise all the way through to the second.

As for her experience on the production itself, every cloud has a silver lining, and Field considered her relationship with Garfield to be one of the best things about "The Amazing Spider-Man." She made a point to emphasize that her co-star is a "lovely actor," which should come as no surprise to those who closely follow Garfield's work. The actress described their relationship on set as a lot of fun and acknowledged that while she didn't find a lot of depth in Aunt May, she and Garfield certainly "found a relationship in who [they] were" as actors and people.