She disagrees, though, that her casting was an example of Hollywood’s negative attitude towards age. She points out that it makes sense in the context of the franchise’s latest reboot, Spider-Man: Homecoming, starring 21-year-old Londoner Tom Holland as the wall-crawling web-slinger in his high school days: “They aged Peter Parker down too. He’s 15 in this movie. I ended up picking the brains of my brother Adam, who’s been an encyclopaedia of Marvel since we were little, and he explained that May’s not related to Peter by blood – she’s his aunt by marriage to his uncle Ben. So she could be elderly or pretty young, depending what age she met her husband. I thought maybe I should lean into it and made a case for them to age me up. A lot of young girls are wearing that silver hair now, so it was something we toyed with.”
Indeed, Tomei has her own pet theory about Ben and May’s back-story. “I decided that maybe he was her professor. I gave it that sexy, naughty little twist in my mind. That’s not in the movie, by the way. ‘A young, hot Aunt May’ isn’t really a character description, so I fleshed out my own mental picture of who she is.” Closer in age to the arachnid adolescent, her Aunt May is more of a teasing big sister figure than an apron-clad, cookie-baking granny type. “Peter’s been a super-nerd with his studies, which is laudable, but my version of Aunt May tries to coax him out of that and broaden his interests, maybe even start dating,” says Tomei.
To her mind, the 2017 Aunt May is also something of a second-wave feminist. “I had numerous conversations with the director, Jon Watts, about Peter Parker being a local hero, which seems particularly apt for these times. He gets those values from Aunt May, who basically raised him. So we discussed how she might be involved in the community and know everyone in the neighbourhood. We considered making her a pro bono lawyer, but didn’t want her to wear suits. Instead we made her a book lover who has her own small publishing firm, like a female collective. She’s got a feminist and humanist edge – at least in my head.”
For Tomei, Hollywood’s sexism is more of an issue than its ageism. “Well, I only got to be old very recently,” she chuckles. “The industry has decided I’m an aunt-type now. I’m like, is this the way it gets broken to me? But in any profession, there’s a lot of sexism. That isn’t exactly headline news. In our business, the numbers certainly don’t lie when you see how few speaking roles there are for women [studies show that 33% of speaking roles and 22% of protagonists are female]. It’s a numbers game and if you start adding in other factors, including age, the odds diminish of getting a great part.”
Is that a source of frustration? “For sure, but frustration is the name of the game in acting. Every actor is frustrated, always worried they won’t get the next job. That’s true of any actor, of any gender, at any success level. And I’ve heard it from very, very successful actors. Sexism is part of the culture, that’s just a fact, but we can try to change that culture. I like to think things have improved in the century since we got the right to vote. But just because it’s 75% better, doesn’t mean you should stop caring about the remaining 25%. We need parity, both in availability of work and our compensation for that work.”
Two years ago, Jennifer Lawrence criticised Hollywood’s gender pay gap after the Sony email hack revealed that she earned considerably less than her male co-stars in American Hustle – and Tomei has Lawrence’s back. “Why should we get paid 75 cents on the dollar and be told we’re lucky to have that?” she says. “It’s wonderful that someone like Jennifer speaks out. Why should she be pilloried? I don’t understand why it’s even controversial. We should get paid on parity. And by the way, Jennifer was the strongest element in that whole package. She should have got paid more, if anything.”
Tomei is speaking from her apartment in Greenwich Village (“Not to be confused with Greenwich, London or Greenwich, Connecticut,” she helpfully points out), nine miles from where she grew up in Brooklyn. She’s seen her home patch transform from a sprawling, diverse borough to the hipster haven of today. “Brooklyn’s changed a lot, for sure. You used to say you were from Brooklyn with chagrin. I always wanted to live in the Village but it seemed a million miles way. It was like in Saturday Night Fever, where their whole dream of escape was to get over that bridge.” Her parents, both of Italian descent, were a teacher and a lawyer. Crucially, they were also theatre lovers who took young Marisa and Adam to Broadway shows, which so captivated the children, both went into acting.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Tomei’s breakthrough role: as Joe Pesci’s brash, drawling fiancee Mona Lisa in wiseguy courtroom comedy My Cousin Vinny, for which Tomei won an Academy Award for best supporting actress. “Wow, is it really 25 years?” she says. “No wonder you were asking about ageism. I did get old! It’s such a funny movie and it really holds up. I was fresh to the business and didn’t know how movies worked but Joe chose me for the part, then took me by the hand and guided me immensely, so I got very lucky. I keep my Oscar in my little library here. Maybe I should throw a Vinny reunion party and bring it out to show everyone? Just kidding.”
Tomei has since been twice nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar. “I’m a leading actress caught in a supporting actress vortex,” she laughs. “But what can you do?” First came director Todd Field’s 2001 family crime drama In the Bedroom, opposite Britain’s own Tom Wilkinson. “He’s a genius, one of my favourite actors, and it was thrilling to watch Tom work,” recalls Tomei. “I pestered him many times to ask how he did it, and he eventually told me he just reads the script a lot. I was like, ‘That’s it? That’s your big secret?’”
Her next Oscar nod was for Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (2008), in which she played an ageing stripper and single mother who strikes up a romance with Micky Rourke’s past-it pro wrestler. “I went to high school with Darren, so it was a little dream come true for us to work together,” says Tomei. The role involved pole-dancing, lap-dancing and nudity – and she’s glad she waited until her 40s to do nude scenes. “Early on, I desperately wanted to be a ‘legitimate’ actress and was concerned I wouldn’t be taken seriously. Plus I’m not sure I could have handled it, emotionally and psychologically. I’m pleased it happened later – not only because it forced me to exercise a lot but there’s also a definite freedom and confidence I’ve gained in my body as I got older.”
After her Oscar win, Tomei appeared in a string of middling 90s comedy-dramas – the likes of Chaplin, Untamed Heart, Only You, The Paper, Slums of Beverly Hills and What Women Want – often with a romantic bent and often opposite her then boyfriend, Robert Downey Jr. The relationship didn’t last, but their close friendship did. Indeed, Downey (aka Iron Man) was instrumental in Tomei being cast as Aunt May: “He recommended me for the role and we had a flirtatious little scene together in Captain America: Civil War [which introduced Tomei and Holland’s characters last year]. Having a familiar face around certainly made me more comfortable.”
Downey Jr has been teasing fans about a potential romance between their characters, referring to her as “Auntie May I?” and telling talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel: “Spider-Man’s got a hot aunt now. My God, imagine the possibilities.” Tomei is renowned as a fine on-screen kisser: she snogged her way around Italy with Downey Jr in Only You and won an MTV award for best kiss with Christian Slater in Untamed Heart. “It’s nice that I’m considered a great kisser,” she cackles. “It’s all about the partner, isn’t it? And it’s only on screen. In real life, I’m shit.”
She has also popped up in two of the biggest TV comedies of all time. Tomei played herself in two-part Seinfeld story The Cadillac as love interest for ‘Lord Of The Idiots’ George Costanza, played by Jason Alexander. “My name was the only reason I got cast,” recalls Tomei. “They just liked the way my name sounded. [Writer] Larry David told me: ‘When you say your name over and over, it has a really strong rhythm: Marisa Tomei… Marisa Tomei…’ But hey, I’ll take it. I’d love to do a TV show with Jason Alexander. We run into each other all the time and always talk about it.”
She then romanced another unlikely sitcom sex god: The Simpsons’s nicey-nicey neighbour Ned Flanders. Tomei guested in a Notting Hill-spoofing storyline about a movie star falling for a shopkeeper. “You should ask Ned Flanders what kind of kisser I am,” she laughs. “Although he’d probably just say I was okily-dokily.”
Tomei currently alternates between film and stage roles. In the past year, she’s starred in a production of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo (“One of my castmates was a goat. A total diva but it had a better union than I did”) and Sarah Ruhl’s off-Broadway play about polyamory, How to Transcend a Happy Marriage. “Marriage is being redefined in all kinds of ways right now, so that was interesting,” she says. “Plus I got to kiss many different people and have a great big orgy scene every evening. It was a real pick-me-up.”
Projects in the pipeline include the lead role in Ms, a HBO biopic series about feminist writer and activist Gloria Steinem. “The script’s still being written but it’s definitely happening,” says Tomei. “I’m a huge fan of Gloria and her life’s work. We’re all indebted to her. She’s a fascinating figure, as were the women around her. That whole period is under-represented on screen. There are lots of great stories still to tell about the women’s revolution.”
At the moment, though, Tomei is relishing being part of the Marvel machine. “It’s so old-fashioned in a way: proper spectacle, gloriously larger than life. Spider-Man comes with fervent fans and intense scrutiny. They keep the script so secret, you have to give back your pages at the end of the day. But the system works and they put out really good movies.”
Will she be back for the inevitable sequels? “We’ll see. Hopefully the fans will love this new iteration and we’ll do more. Anyway, I think Aunt May should get her own spin-off. Something should go on with Tony Stark, and those two should get into their own capers.”
