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Nicolas Cage is known for two things: buying dinosaur bones and making movies.
Okay, he’s probably known for more than just that – he may also have been cursed by a haunted mansion, and he bought an octopus to help with his acting once.
Still, the point is that Cage is a capital ‘M’ movie star who makes films for the big screen.
Or that used to be the case, at least before the Amazon Prime Video show Spider-Noir – an alternate version of Spider-Man from the 1930s – came along.
The show marks the first time in Cage’s 45-year-long career that he’s appeared in an ongoing TV series.
So, who twisted Cage’s arm to get him to break his decades-long rule and play Ben Reilly, aka The Spider?
Well, it was none other than Oren Uziel, the Spider-Noir showrunner, and he disputes that any arms had to be bent.
‘Twist his arm would be a little strong,’ he laughed when Metro asked how he convinced Nick to star in the show.
‘He was familiar with the character, and he loves comic books. I think he wanted to hear from me and learn what type of show I wanted to make.
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Are you excited for Spider-Noir?
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Yes – it looks amazing!
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I’m not into superhero things – but this looks different
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No thanks
‘We just really went back and forth about all the film noirs that we love as well. It’s not just comic books, and he is encyclopedic in his knowledge of film noir and cinema itself.’
Uziel believes that once Nick felt ‘comfortable with what we were going to do’ and knew that they aspired to make something ‘cinematic’, he was in.
So, did Oren name a specific film that caught Nick’s attention? Well, not quite.
While chatting, the pair named films like The Third Man, In a Lonely Place, Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, and Night of the Hunter.
Oren’s convinced that his knowledge of Noir is what ‘excited’ Nick because it proved he ‘cared about the same things [Nick] does.’
Speaking of excitable, I had to know whether Nick, who’s known for his larger-than-life acting style (he calls it Western Kabuki), brought anything to the character Oren didn’t expect, and the answer won’t surprise long-time Cage fans.
Why not Peter Parker?
A lot of Spider-Man fans have wondered why this version of Spider-Man isn’t a Peter Parker variant and instead goes by the name Ben Reilly. Well, dear reader, we got the tea for you…
Metro: One of the more interesting things about the show is that this isn’t Peter Parker, this is Ben Reilly. There is a fan theory going around online that there are rules about Peter Parker not being able to drink alcohol or light up a cigarette. Can you confirm or deny whether that is true, or is this just Reddit getting away, running away with itself?
Oren: I think that’s Reddit getting, running away with itself. There weren’t really hard rules put in place. I think they understand this is a show that takes place in the noir world, and these characters drink and smoke, and that they’re living in that space in 1933. So we did what we wanted to do.
Metro: I was genuinely surprised at how violent it was, especially in that third episode. Was there ever any pushback at any point, saying, “Spider-Man can’t be this violent?“
Oren: No, no, it was really this show is interesting because we got so much support from all sides of what we were trying to do. I think that they understood if you’re making Spider- Noir, if you’re making a Spider-Show set in the 1930s in a film noir world, these characters have to behave like that or it’s a betrayal, I think, of fans of both genres.
‘1,000,000% I think when you work with someone like Nick, he’s going to bring a point of view, and that’s why he’s the legend that he is,’ Oren explained.
‘I think I had a very clear picture of what I wanted, but I also knew that Nick was going to play the role, and we worked on it together.
‘We worked on it throughout the season, because we always wanted to make sure that we were not just making another version of [Spider-Man] that people had seen before.
‘As we got deeper and deeper into it, and realised what happened to him to make him become The Spider affected him so deeply down to a cellular level.
‘It changed him more than we can imagine, and it’s almost harder for him to be human at this point than it is for him to be a spider, and I think watching Ben inhabit that physicality and emotional emotionality of that experience, watching Nick do that was amazing.’
Spider-Noir will premiere on 27th May 2026 exclusively on Prime Video in the UK.
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