More often than not these days, video game characters are modeled after real people. A lot of fan-favorite characters, such as Ashley inResident Evil 4, Dina inThe Last of Us Part 2, and Alan Wake inAlan Wake 2, are just a few examples of this. Mary Jane in both of Insomniac’sSpider-Mangames is another good example, but sometimes the extra attention of being a face model can be too much.
This seems to be the case for the latter, as Mary Jane face model Stephanie Tyler Jones recently took to Instagram to call out Spider-Man fans who have been stalking and harassing her over the past few days. In a recent Instagram story shared by Twitter user Silverxsable, Jones claims that some of her followers have “crossed boundaries”, with one fan leaving her multiple voicemails at her workplace.
Jones also implies that her personal skincare page has been dominated by Spider-Man fans of late, and explains that she is no longer auditioning as an actor or model, though it’s unclear whether this is down to harassment or just personal choice. Either way, Jones goes on to ask fans to “respect that I am human” and not to send messages or cross boundaries in the future.
It’s sadly unsurprising that Jones is no longer auditioning for roles, or that Spider-Man fans are being weird as of late over her role in the games. A lot of fuss has been made over the differences in Mary Jane’s character model between the two mainline Spider-Man games, with some claiming that Insomniac changed face models between titles.
Insomniac’s director of community and marketing even had toclarify on Twitterbefore the game’s release that Mary Jane shares the same voice actress and face model in both titles.
The sheer amount of negative comments, coupled with the ability for gamers to be extremely weird in the best of situations, and it’s no wonder why Jones has stepped back from professional acting and modeling for the time being.
Unfortunately, Jones' current situation has become more and more common in recent years, with multiple examples of actor harassment taking place throughout 2023. For example, Eduard Badaluta and Lily Gao - the face model for Leon Kennedy and voice actress for Ada Wong - haveboth had bad experiences on Instagram since the launch of Resident Evil 4, with the latterhaving to deactivate comments over abuse.
Even more recently,Baldur’s Gate 3 actor Josh Wichard received abuse from fansafter accidentally implying that he did all the epilogue mocap for Karlach, with some going so far as to contact his parents. It’s an industry-wide issue that seems to have no clear solution, but hopefully more actors like Jones speaking out will do some good in trying to prevent it in the future.
