Spider-Noir star Nicolas Cage never planned on venturing into TV, but one of the greatest shows ever made convinced him to give it a shot.
Cage plays '30s private detective (and web-slinging hero) Ben Reilly in Prime Video's Spider-Noir, which might not have happened had Breaking Bad not convinced him television was worth trying.
"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," Cage told Variety. "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," he continued. "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."
Luckily, Spider-Noir seemed like the right project. "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," Cage explained. "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."
Spider-Noir currently sits at a near-perfect score of 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, and our own 3.5 star Spider-Noir review says: "A delightfully camp, low-stakes romp through 1930s New York City that proves Nicolas Cage is still cooler than all of us. Though it doesn't feel as big as most Marvel shows, or even Spider-Verse, and suffers from predictable plot turns that even the characters don't seem fazed by... it wants to cure your superhero fatigue, and it's even better on the second watch."
You can stream all of Spider-Noir on Prime Video now. For more on the show, check out our Spider-Noir ending explained or our guide on how to watch Spider-Noir in black and white.
