Why SPIDER-NOIR's Smartest Move Was Putting Ben Reilly Front and Center
When details finally started surfacing about the Spider-Noir series, one reveal immediately grabbed fans by the lapels. This isn’t a smoky, black-and-white spin on Peter Parker prowling the streets as a hardboiled private eye.
Instead, the man under the trench coat and fedora is Ben Reilly, a choice that makes a lot more sense for the project and the story it is going to tell.
The creative team wanted a Spider-Man who already feels worn down by the world. As co-showrunner Oren Uziel explained, Peter carries too much youthful energy and is still closely tied to high school and coming-of-age stories.
That doesn’t quite fit a noir series built around a detective known simply as “The Spider.” Ben, on the other hand, already lived the life, took the hits, and paid the price.
“He’s already gone through the entire arc and has seen it all,” Uziel said. “He’s over it, and trying to move past it. But his past kind of keeps coming back to haunt him.”
That haunted quality is exactly what producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller leaned into when shaping the show’s version of the character. Their Ben Reilly isn’t figuring things out for the first time. He’s older, rougher around the edges, and already disillusioned in a way that feels baked into classic noir storytelling.
They described him as “older and jaded” compared to Peter, the kind of guy who’s “already had his Chinatown disillusionment moment that happened years and years ago.”
That reference to Chinatown is hinting at a past event that broke something inside him. The show plans to slowly unpack what that moment was and why he’s now operating under the name Ben instead of Peter.
Casting Nicolas Cage only pushes that vibe further into strange, awesome territory. Cage told Esquire he approached the role with a very specific blend in mind, aiming for a 70/30 mix of Humphrey Bogart and Bugs Bunny.
Lord offered an even weirder and more Cage-appropriate explanation of what the actor brought to the table.
“[Nic’s] take on it was, ‘I’m a spider trying to cosplay as a human,’” he said. “He’s code-switching. Inside his body, he feels like an animal.”
Miller added that this mindset is “why you cast Nicolas Cage. He’s going to come at a character in a way that no one else would think of.”
Ben Reilly isn’t learning how to be Spider-Man. He’s trying to live with what being Spider-Man already did to him. With Cage fully leaning into the oddness and the show embracing its noir roots, this feels like a fresh corner of the Marvel universe worth exploring when Spider-Noir lands on Prime Video later this year.