Jonathan Sim
Nicolas Cage has never been easy to put in a box, and Spider-Noir—Amazon’s new live-action series based on the beloved noir-styled web-slinger first glimpsed in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse—seems to know that.
The show, which spans eight full episodes, follows Ben Reilly, a hard-boiled, black-and-white Spider-Man operating in a 1930s New York drenched in shadow and moral ambiguity. It is a world tailor-made for strangeness, for poetry, for exactly the kind of actor who, when asked for a favorite quote from his own filmography, reaches for something like this:
“The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us. We are here to ruin ourselves and die.” Cage delivered the line from Moonstruck, his 1987 romantic comedy co-starring Cher, on the red carpet at the show’s New York City premiere.
The premiere drew out the full cast of the series, and the conversations on that carpet offered a rare, unguarded look at the people behind a production that has quietly become one of the most anticipated genre shows in recent memory. What emerged was a portrait of a show that took its source material seriously, and then deliberately left it behind.
Showrunner and creator Oren Uziel was candid about that decision. The original Spider-Verse incarnation of Spider-Man Noir appeared on screen for only a handful of minutes—charming, funny, but necessarily thin. Turning that sketch into a full series required a different approach entirely. “I think it was to take that Spider-Verse movie as inspiration and then leave it at that,” Uziel said. “You don’t have to be overly devoted to what we saw there, because it was only on screen for a little while and this is eight full episodes. So we really had to work to create a three-dimensional character, both just because it’s live action, and because that’s what’s going to hold your interest for the entire series.”
That three-dimensionality extends to the villains. Silvermane, the aging mob boss who serves as one of the show’s central antagonists, could have been a stock Italian gangster, and nearly was. Brendan Gleeson, who plays him, had other ideas.
“He started off Italian,” Gleeson said, with the measured diplomacy of someone who has made this argument before. “So I said, ‘That’s not a good idea for me. It’s not a good look. It’s an acting challenge, but I’m not prepared to do it.’ I did play a Panamanian one time [in The Tailor of Panama], and I had cause to regret it.”
The solution arrived quickly. “We had a chat, and they decided to make him Irish,” Gleeson said. “And I decided to make him Dublin rather than anything else, because it seemed appropriate.” There is something wonderfully specific about that; not just Irish, but Dublin, with all the particular music that implies. Asked to sum up the show in three words, Gleeson barely paused. “Fresh and old,” he said. A beat. “That’s three words.”
Lamorne Morris, who plays Robbie Robertson, the veteran newsman who has been part of Spider-Man’s world since the comics’ earliest days, described finding out the role in a way that captured something of the Marvel machine’s peculiar mystique. The studio, he explained, is famously tight-lipped about casting, often giving actors pseudonyms for their characters well into the audition process.
“They were really secretive sometimes about these things,” Morris said. “They give you a script and material, but when I took the meeting, they were like, ‘You’re playing Robbie Robertson.’ Now, in my mind, I kept thinking, ‘Yeah, but who am I playing?’ Because you don’t just tell people who they’re playing in the Marvel universe. You give them a fake name or whatever. And they were like, ‘No, no—Robbie Robertson.’ And I went, ‘Wait, for real?'”
His excitement was grounded in something specific: what the role could finally become. “I love what Bill Nunn did in the Raimi films,” Morris said, “but he was here and there; they didn’t get a chance to explore his backstory so much. We really wanted to see that. So I think it’s really cool that they’re opening it up and we get a chance to see a lot of the arc of Robbie.”
Andrew Caldwell, who plays Dirk Leydon, a.k.a. Megawatt, a villain with a relatively modest footprint in the comics, brought an infectious, loose energy to the carpet, at one point cheerfully mid-sentence popping a mint and refusing to apologize for it. The character, he said, was one he had to discover largely on his own.
“Megawatt is, you know, not as common in the comics,” Caldwell said. “So I was given the luxury of kind of creating this character from scratch. So that’s what I did.” He had come into the process through a long string of auditions for various roles, and the eventual casting came almost as a surprise. The scale of the production, he said, was equally unexpected, especially for someone whose superhero credits include Nickelodeon’s Henry Danger. “There’s nothing that felt like Spider-Noir, man,” he said. “This set, this production, the size, the spectacle, all of it—there’s no comparison.”
The night had the particular electricity of a New York premiere that knows it has something—a cast loose and warm with each other, a creative team confident in what they’ve made. From a stunt in which a man dressed like The Spider arrived on top of a 1930s-era automobile and scaled the exterior of the movie theater to a cast thrilled to discuss this new take on the superhero genre, this event showed tons of promise for what Spider-Noir has to offer.
Spider-Noir premieres on Prime Video on May 27.
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