Nicolas Cage Explains Why BREAKING BAD Convinced Him to Finally Do TV With SPIDER-NOIR

For years, Nicolas Cage had zero interest in television. No matter how much the TV landscape evolved or how many prestige dramas exploded in popularity, the actor just wasn’t interested in stepping into that world. Then Breaking Bad came along and changed his mind.

Cage is now starring in Spider-Noir as 1930s private detective and masked vigilante Ben Reilly, but according to the actor, the Prime Video series almost never happened because he had completely written off TV.

"I was adamant about not doing television, because I didn't want to do anything that was too homogenized or that was like everybody else, and my son sat me down during COVID, and he showed me Breaking Bad.

"I began to see that the actors in that show were afforded the luxury of time to tell their story. I saw Bryan Cranston staring at a suitcase for what seemed like minutes. I couldn't take my eyes off him, and all he was doing was staring at a suitcase, and it occurred to me that you can't do that in movies: You don't have the time.

“I thought, maybe with an eight-hour narrative I can start planting seeds for a character that can bloom into something that I don't have the luxury of time to do in a movie. That was the main attraction."

Long-form storytelling gives performers room to build characters in ways movies usually can’t. Cage clearly saw that while watching Bryan Cranston work his magic in Breaking Bad, and it opened the door for him creatively.

Thankfully for fans, Spider-Noir turned out to be the project that finally pulled him in. I’m in the middle of watching it now, and I’m loving it! I’m enjoying the hell out of Cage’s performance!

"I waited for something that I thought would be special, and I can tell you that with Spider-Noir, the vision that I had in my imagination manifested in the exact way that I'd hoped, and it was scary, and it was risky.

“I was constantly worried that I was going to get fired, because I was doing this thing of channeling old actors and colliding it with Stan Lee's masterpiece that is Spider-Man to create this Roy Lichtenstein pop-art sensation of sorts. I didn't know until I finally saw the eight episodes whether it was going to work."

That weird creative energy is exactly why Cage is perfect for this version of Spider-Man. The series leans hard into pulpy noir storytelling, stylized performances, and comic book madness, and Cage apparently went all in on making the character feel unlike anything else in the superhero genre.

Spider-Noir is currently sitting at a strong 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, and audiences have been having a lot of fun with its strange, campy take on Marvel storytelling.

All eight episodes of Spider-Noir are now streaming on Prime Video.