Nicolas Cage said watching Breaking Bad made him realise that television offered the “luxury of time” that films did not, convincing him to take on the lead role in the Marvel series Spider-Noir.
Cage said that he avoided TV for years because he did not want to do work that felt “homogenised” or “like everybody else” but changed his mind after watching the AMC drama during the Covid pandemic.
“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 cannot do that in movies: You don’t have the time,” he told Variety.
Cage said the prospect of a longer-form narrative made television appealing. “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,” he said. “That was the main attraction.”
Cage is starring in Spider-Noir, an eight-episode live-action series from Amazon MGM Studios based on the Marvel comic Spider-Man Noir.
He stars as ageing private investigator and superhero Ben Reilly in 1930s New York, reprising a version of the character he voices in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
Also starring Lamorne Morris, Brendan Gleeson, and Abraham Popoola, Spider-Noir comes in two versions – a black-and-white cut to resemble classic noir films and a colour version inspired by the stylised comic-book aesthetic of films like Dick Tracy.
Cage also shared the influences behind his performance, saying he drew heavily from classic Hollywood noir and German expressionist cinema.
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“I wanted to try to create an essence of some of my favourite old-world actors because I wanted to embody that style,” Cage told Variety, and named Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and Edward G Robinson as his inspirations.
“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.”
Cage also said the way he moved in Spider-Noir was inspired by Max Schreck’s performance in F W Murnau’s 1922 silent horror film Nosferatu. “That, to me, is indicative of German expressionism, the choreography,” he said. “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.”
“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.”
Cage’s shifting accent through the series immediately drew attention from viewers, but director Oren Uziel said it was deliberate and was “all about his character”.
“He becomes The Spider and he becomes more spider than man, and has to learn how to be human. So this is him educating himself. That’s him going to the gym, almost,” he told Slash Film.
“So, it was really fun, and it explains why often he is doing Bogart, or doing Cagney, or doing Peter Lorre. It was so fun.”
Uziel referred to the scene of Reilly watching the 1936 crime drama Great Guy starring James Cagney, and said he filmed scenes of Cage’s character watching multiple classic films before settling on this. “We scanned so many movies and then looked for the right clips that would be fun for him to mimic.”
All episodes of Spider-Noir are now available for streaming on Prime Video UK, in black-and-white and colour versions.
