At the 2018 San Diego Comic-Con panel for the upcoming animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Sony Pictures revealed that voice cast members Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson and Hailee Steinfeld would be joined by the likes of Kimiko Glenn, John Mulaney and Nicolas Cage. The latter two were especially as fun, as Mulaney would be voicing Peter Porker, otherwise known as Spider-Ham. (Yes, this is an actual thing from Marvel Comics.) As for Cage, he would be playing the darkly comic Spider-Man Noir, Spider-Verse‘s take on DC’s Batman.
Less than a month has passed since Glenn, Mulaney and Cage’s casting was announced, and nothing new has filtered through. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, however, the latter revealed his version of Peter Parker would be based on Humphrey Bogart and other Hollywood luminaries from the ’30s and ’40s:
“My character’s Spider-Man Noir. He’s really Peter Parker from the ’30s. I tried to channel those noir films with [Humphrey] Bogart, and have those kinds of sounds that he might make with [James] Cagney, or Edward G. Robinson, that kind of way of talking. I tried to give the character that. It was a lot of fun. I think it should be quite funny. The movie definitely has a sense of humor, and that’s a good thing because it’s good for the whole family.”
“There are multiple Spider-Men in different dimensions that are kind of colliding together,” Cage said of the film’s plot. Serious discussions of film noir history and “good for the whole family” notwithstanding, the sheer fact that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is about to gift the world with Cage doing an amalgamation of Bogart, Cagney and Robinson is wonderful. Or to paraphrase Christian Bale in Batman Begins, “I’m Spider-Man!”
(Via Entertainment Weekly)