Alright, let’s do this one last time. Everyone knows the story of Spider-Man. Yeah, Peter Parker, high school kid, radioactive spider, great power, great responsibility. We’ve seen it play out across comics, cartoons, blockbusters, and multiverses that the origin is practically webbed into our DNA at this point.
But… what happens in “Spider-Noir” isn’t quite the same. That is, it’s not interested in telling it again.
Well, this show drops us into a different New York. There’s a Depression-era, rain-slicked, morally exhausted vibe. And the mask is in the monochrome hands of Ben Reilly, an aging private detective who carries the arachnid DNA like a burden rather than a blessing.
And it casts Nicolas Cage in the role, returning to it, in a sense, having already voiced the character in animated form. And since it’s the legendary Cage, this tells you immediately that whatever this is, it isn’t going to be a conventional ride.
Alongside Cage, the series assembles a cast that leans fully into the noir atmosphere. Brendan Gleeson plays Silvermane, the show’s primary antagonist. Li Jun Li, Lamorne Morris, and Karen Rodriguez round out the ensemble, each bringing the kind of lived-in grit the world demands.
The Collision That Started It All
The first thing you need to understand about “Spider-Noir” is that it was never really a superhero project. Well, not in Cage’s mind, anyway. In fact, in an interview with Esquire, he even names Bugs Bunny as one of the elements that’s peppered into his performance.
“Superhero was nowhere on my mind,” he says. Instead, what was on his mind was a collision. It was a deliberate, smelting of two elements that had no business being in the same room.
It is, on one end, the stylized film performances of the 1930s and ’40s. It’s the world of Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, of hard shadows and harder men. On the other hand, we have the man of the hour himself. Yes, Spider-Man! One of the most enduring pop art creations of the twentieth century.
“I really wanted to have a go at a vision I had in my imagination of trying to create a pop art expression by colliding two very polar opposites,” Cage explains. “Taking that style and smashing it into Stan Lee’s masterpiece, Spider-Man, and getting these two rocks to see what spark would emanate.”
The reference point he keeps returning to is Roy Lichtenstein — the artist who took the visual language of comic books and blew them up into gallery-worthy statements about mass culture and reproduction. Cage was chasing that same energy. Something that felt both lowbrow and highbrow, familiar and completely strange.
“It was like, for me, like a pop art expression,” he says. “That was what drew me into it.”
“Oh, by the way, he’s [Humphrey] Bogart and he just happens to be Spider-Man.'”
A Man Losing the War Against His Own Body
So what makes Ben Reilly Spider-Noir’s version of the web-slinger genuinely unsettling is that he isn’t winning. He’s not a teenager bitten by a radioactive spider who gets cool powers and learns responsibility. He’s older. He’s tired. And the arachnid DNA running through his veins isn’t a gift so much as a siege.
“Unlike the other Spider-Men, I wanted to really explore what arachnid DNA in his blood would do to his movements and to his psyche,” Cage says. “So he’s not a fresh-faced teenager. He’s an aging detective who, by the way, has arachnid DNA in his body, and he’s trying to be human again, and it’s not easy.”
Unlike the MCU’s zippy optimism, the performance Cage drew upon was Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly”. The inspiration is a man contending with the animality creeping through him, trying to hold on to something recognizably human. And this gave Cage the sandbox he needed to let loose as the Spider.
“I was hopeful that in long-format television, I would have the luxury of time to drop little seeds in it,” he says. “Like the arachnid DNA. And how does that make him move? Or what does that make him want to watch movies and learn how to be more human again? All that stuff came out while we were shooting. It wasn’t in the script.”
All That Jazz
When Cage talks about the acting approach, he reaches for an analogy you wouldn’t expect. He doesn’t name another actor. He names Amy Winehouse.
“When Amy Winehouse did “Back to Black”, she was channelling these jazz crooners like Tony Bennett, but she gave it a contemporary feel. She wasn’t imitating them, but she was embodying that essence. I was trying to do the same thing with some of my favourite actors, whether it was Edward G. Robinson or Cagney or Bogart.”
To Cage, the goal wasn’t recreation but, rather, resurrection. Cage wanted Ben to have a performance rooted in a vanished era of film, but still capable of making you feel something real. And yes, unlike his animated counterpart, you wouldn’t need to burn matchsticks to your fingertips just to feel that.
“How do I make this stylized performance also be genuinely emotional and communicate to the audience that you can feel something in the character’s eyes?” he asks. “That even though he’s idiosyncratic, he’s still relatable. That was the challenge.”
But don’t expect Cage to think of the web-slinger first when it comes to ideating it all. To Cage, elements such as web-swinging and the villain showdowns were almost secondary. “The superhero stuff was just gravy or icing on top,” he says. “That’s the other side, the collision stuff that makes a difference.”
“I was hopeful that in long-format television, I would have the luxury of time to drop little seeds in it.”
Black, White, and Everything In Between
“Spider-Noir” releases in two versions. There’s black-and-white. And there’s also the option of full colour.
The idea came from Cage himself. But it’s more than a gimmick. Rather, it’s a structural argument about what the show is and how it wants to be received.
“I designed my character to fit into the black-and-white format,” he says. “It is a black-and-white, old-school performance. So that, for me, is the best way to watch the show.”
However, he worried that younger viewers, unfamiliar with black-and-white as a visual grammar, might bounce off it. The colour version was his solution. it coudl be an entry point, almost a translation. Yet, you can’t replace an original vision, he explains. The performance was built for monochrome, for the stark architecture of shadow and light that defines the noir tradition.
What’s quietly radical about this arrangement is what it says to the audience: you choose. There’s no director’s cut framed as the real one, no definitive version handed down from on high. You pick the version that fits your eye, your mood, your appetite. One path gives you a purer, more austere experience. The other opens the world up in colour. Neither is wrong. The show doesn’t tell you which version to love. It trusts you to find out.
That mirrors something essential about noir as a genre. Noir has never been interested in handing you easy answers. It puts you in a room with morally compromised people making impossible choices, and it lets you sit with the discomfort. “Spider-Noir” extends that logic beyond the story itself, into the act of watching. The dual format fits thematically as the show practices what it preaches.
“I do think it will become the model,” Cage says, “and other studios will start doing it, which would be great for directors because they all want to do black-and-white movies, and all actors want to be in black-and-white movies.”
Two Men on Different Sides of the Same Fence
In Silvermane, played by Brendan Gleeson, “Spider-Noir” found exactly the kind of villain the show needed. Not a cackling monster, but a man Ben Reilly might have liked under different circumstances.
“I wanted that complexity — that it seemed like they almost liked each other,” Cage says, “even though he’s the heavy and I’m the so-called good guy or hero.”
It’s a relationship built on mutual recognition. Cage had admired Gleeson for years, particularly in “The General”. When they finally worked together, those years of watching paid off. There was an existing respect between them, a shorthand in fact, that made the charged dynamic between their characters feel lived-in and real.
And it feeds directly back into that central noir truth. No one’s perfectly good. Not the PI with spider-blood in his veins who struggles to feel human. Not the old crime boss trying to hold his empire together. Everyone’s operating in the grey, navigating a world that offers no clean exits. “Everyone’s got a bad story to tell,” Cage says, “and that’s what makes it more authentic.”
And perhaps that’s the point. Detective work would be like solving a Rubik’s Cube when every side looks the same. There are no clear answers. No obvious villains. Just shades of grey, and the stubborn attempt to make sense of them…
“For me, Spider-Noir is one of two or three times that a vision in my imagination manifested exactly as I had hoped.”
Something That Manifested Exactly as Hoped
Nicolas Cage has been making films for over forty years. In that span, he’s delivered performances ranging from the quietly devastating to the operatically unhinged, picked up an Academy Award, become a cult icon, and generated a level of discourse about the nature of screen acting that most performers never have to contend with.
By his own account, only a handful of his projects have ever landed exactly where he aimed them.
Yet, surprisingly, he reveals that “Spider-Noir” is one of them.
“It was scary. It was thrilling, and it was challenging, but I didn’t really know if we were going to get there until I saw all eight episodes,” he says. He watched them, went to bed, and woke up smiling.
“I felt like it accomplished that feeling of transportation — taking the audience to another New York, another dimension, and another time. It felt new and at the same time believable to me.”
Surely, a world slightly darker than ours, where the light falls differently would be a unique premise for the webslinging hero we’ve all come to love. Cage found a way to give that world a new stranger. He’s a man crawling walls in a fedora, trying to remember what it felt like to be simply, ordinarily human.
The choice of how to see him is yours. Black and white, or colour. Straight crime story or surrealist pop art experiment. Superhero mythology or character study drawn from Old Hollywood. In “Spider-Noir”, as in noir itself, there’s no right answer. Just the one you can live with.
Watch the trailer in Authentic Black & White here:
Watch the True-Hue Full Colour trailer here:
All eight episodes of “Spider-Noir” are currently streaming on Prime Video.
