Nicolas Cage Talks About Finally Finding the Perfect Superhero Match With SPIDER-NOIR

For a guy who’s spent decades orbiting comic book movies in one way or another, it’s kind of wild that Nicolas Cage is only now landing on the superhero role that feels completely built for his particular brand of cinematic chaos.

His history with the genre has been a strange Hollywood odyssey all on its own. There was the infamous canceled Superman Lives with Tim Burton, where Cage almost became the Man of Steel before the project collapsed just weeks ahead of production.

Sam Raimi once wanted him to play Green Goblin in Spider-Man. He flirted with villain roles like Bloodnofsky in The Green Hornet, only for creative differences to derail things.

Even his stage name came from Marvel hero Luke Cage after he chose to distance himself from the Coppola family name.

Sure, he’s played comic book characters before. He starred in Ghost Rider, stole scenes as Big Daddy in Kick-Ass, and voiced Spider-Man Noir in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. But none of those fully tapped into the exact wavelength Cage operates on as a performer.

That finally changes with Spider-Noir.

The new series premieres May 27 on Prime Video. Set in Depression-era New York City, the story follows Ben Reilly, a burned-out private investigator who has stepped away from his Spider-Man identity after the death of his wife, played by Diane Kruger.

But when nightclub singer Cat Hardy, played by Li Jun Li, and a dangerous case involving World War I veterans with mysterious powers enter his life, he gets dragged back into the shadows.

The show comes from creator Oren Uziel and adapts the Marvel Comics version of Spider-Man Noir that Cage already helped make popular in Into the Spider-Verse.

The series is available in both black-and-white and color, though the monochrome version sounds like the way to go considering how deeply the production leans into classic noir aesthetics.

Speaking with Variety, Cage opened up about the old Hollywood influences that shaped his performance and the movies that inspired the series.

“Oh yeah. Richard Basehart in a film called He Walked by Night was quite wonderful. I saw it when I was very young. The movies that informed Spider-Noir were certainly The Big Sleep by Howard Hawks, with its rhythm and fast-paced dialogue; The Maltese Falcon and In a Lonely Place. A lot of Bogart.

“I wanted to try to create an essence of some of my favorite old world actors because I wanted to embody that style — Bogart, Cagney, Edward G. Robinson — and designed my performance to fit within the black-and-white format, just as Darran Tiernan was doing with the photography and Trayce Field was doing with the wardrobe.

“I wanted all of that to coalesce so when you watch the black-and-white format of Spider-Noir, you really feel like you’re being transported to another time.”

That approach sounds exactly like the kind of thing Cage thrives on. He isn’t just playing a superhero detective. He’s building a performance around the rhythms and physicality of classic noir cinema.

There’s also apparently a sarcastic streak running through the character that adds another layer to the performance. Cage talked about channeling Humphrey Bogart’s amused detachment when dealing with dangerous people.

“I think the thing that I kept looking at with the Bogart element was that he seems so bemused, like in “The Big Sleep,” when the femme fatale is doing anything wicked he finds it amusing — he enjoys seeing the danger in other people — and I wanted to play a little more of that.

“As you go deeper into the different episodes, you’ll see other influences emanating. One of the things that we managed to sprinkle in, which is a luxury of doing episodic television, is you have the time to plant these little seeds and watch them blossom.

“Oren Uziel, the showrunner, and I got to the point of explaining why he is the way he is, and how he’s trying to reprogram his humanity because the DNA of the arachnid is in his body, so he’s trying to figure out how to be human again.”

That’s the kind of wonderfully strange character detail Cage can really sink his teeth into. And because it’s Nicolas Cage, the physical performance also came with some unexpected inspiration pulled from German expressionism and spider anatomy.

“It’s no secret that people know that I like old-style German expressionism, and I remember Max Schreck in “Nosferatu” at the end before he gets hit by the light and turns into a puff of smoke, he just goes like that [tilts hand down].

“That, to me, is indicative of German expressionism, the choreography. It seemed to me that a move like that would be arachnid, so I worked with my body to create that feeling of an animality in the character.

“Did I study spiders? No. But I do know a little bit about them, and one of the most interesting things I find with spiders is that they have no muscles — their appendages are like straws, and they shoot fluid to move — and so that informed this idea of the movements.”

That explanation feels perfectly on-brand for Cage. Most actors would probably stop at “I watched some noir movies.” Cage somehow turns the conversation into German expressionism, spider hydraulics, and physical choreography inspired by Nosferatu.

Which is exactly why Spider-Noir might end up being the superhero project fans have wanted from him all along.