We’re wrapping up this busy, busy Emmy FYC season with one last bonus episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast — and this time I’m handing the reins over to my colleague Christopher Rosen, who emceed an incredibly fun afternoon talking about one of the most inventive and surprising shows of the spring TV season: Prime Video’s Spider-Noir. Take it away, Chris!
No one knows the effect Nicolas Cage has on other people more than Nicolas Cage.
“He’s so nice. He’s so cool. He’s so self-aware,” says Cage’s Spider-Noir co-star Lamorne Morris.
An example: On the set of Prime Video’s new series from co-showrunner and executive producer Oren Uziel — about a hard-boiled 1930s detective named Ben Reilly (played by Cage) who moonlights as Spider-Man — the Oscar-winning actor was preparing for a scene by repeating a line (“a guy like you and a suit like that”) to maintain his distinctive, era-appropriate cadence. Among those watching Cage gear up for the scene was co-star Karen Rodriguez, who plays Ben’s loyal secretary, Janet. Then, Cage suddenly stopped — and quoted one of his most famous and oft-imitated lines.
“He stares directly at her and goes, ‘I’m going to steal the Declaration of Independence,’” Morris says, doing a perfect impression of Cage’s National Treasure character — as you can hear in today’s special live episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast (recorded at the London West Hollywood hotel in Beverly Hills). “As an actor, sometimes when you’re at a restaurant or in an airport, you know when somebody’s staring at you a little bit. In that moment, he knew.”
But what Morris says made the interaction stand out is how everyone around Cage and Rodriguez responded. “Everybody in the room cracked up because they were all staring at him, too,” he says. “He’s such a larger-than-life figure, but at the same time, very disarming because he will do some stuff like that.”
Based on the Spider-Noir comic series and developed by Uziel and Steve Lightfoot, the eight-episode first season of Spider-Noir blends the film noir genre and the classic Spider-Man story with great fidelity to both — down to availability in two versions: black and white for noir heads and color for comic fans.
“It was in the writing and also just the whole vibe of the noir — the long shadows and the costumes and everything about it,” says Lukas Haas, who plays Winston, the top enforcer for the show’s heavy, Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson). “It made it easy to be playful, and I think that’s kind of the key to it at the end of the day.”
Cage was the first actor to board the ambitious project; he voiced the Peter Parker variant of Spider-Noir in 2018’s Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but the show, which counts Spider-Verse producers and writers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller as executive producers, is not based in that same universe. Still, when it came time to surround Cage with actors — including Gleeson, Morris as Spider-Man pal Robbie Robertson and Jack Huston as frequent Spidey antagonist, Flint Marko aka Sandman — Uziel knew he needed to find stars who could bring out the best in his lead.
“It’s a bit of luck, a bit of just characters who are on the page and then a cast that knows what to do with them,” he says, gesturing toward Morris, Rodriguez, Huston and Haas. “But chemistry was there at every single triangle that you can create. They all felt that when they were best friends, they’d been best friends for their whole lives; when they were enemies, it felt like they’ve hated each other for the whole time. That’s just a testament to how talented everyone seated to my left really is.”
Watch the full conversation with the Spider-Noir team above, and thanks again to Prime Video for making the episode possible.
