Nicolas Cage revels in being 'a Spider-Man for aging adults'

Brian Truitt, USA TODAYWed, May 27, 2026 at 1:01 PM UTC

0

At 62, Nicolas Cage is finally embracing his inner Spider-Man, swinging around the Big Apple with style while also feeling his age a bit.

Playing the hardboiled hero of “Spider-Noir” (streaming now on Prime Video, in black and white and “True-Hue” color) means getting into assorted derring-do with some wirework involved.

Cage loves the stuff, even though “you're always thinking, ‘This could snap, and I'm going to drop,’ ” he says. “But there's a bit of excitement and bliss: OK, this is dangerous, and I'm feeling some adrenaline in my body, and I'm enjoying myself.”

In 1930s New York City, private detective Ben Reilly (Cage) hung up his heroic mask and fedora as the legendary Spider five years ago. A new case involving a notorious gangster (Brendan Gleeson), a femme-fatale singer (Li Jun Li) and a bunch of ex-soldiers with superpowers finds Ben embracing his spectacular spider-abilities once again.

Private detective Ben Reilly (Nicolas Cage) is a former superhero with a complicated new case in the new 1930s-set action series "Spider-Noir."

He’s far past his prime and gets his butt handed to him often in a brawl, but that makes him "relatable," Cage adds. "There's a lot of us getting older here, and we're not moving the same way we were when we were 18. And I think that's the difference. He’s a Spider-Man for aging adults."

The Oscar winner talks with USA TODAY about his “Spider-Noir” inspirations, insect moves and the Spidey big bad he almost played.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

The Spider (Nicolas Cage), clad in a mask and stylish fedora, thwips into action in "Spider-Noir."

Question: Little kids love to mimic the way Spider-Man shoots webs from his wrist. Do you feel a sense of play when you're doing that, too?

Nicolas Cage: One-hundred percent. You’ve got to have fun with what you're doing, and it all goes back to pretending you're these characters, whether it's on Halloween or in the backyard with your friends. That's the root.

What's the best part of being Ben Reilly?

It's no secret that I get a lot of inspiration from different kinds of art. In this case, I was trying to create a kind of Roy Lichtenstein pop-art mashup by taking some of the noir-style film acting, embody that essence, and then collide it with Spider-Man and see what spark you get.

Advertisement

I'll tell you, I didn't know if I was going to keep my job because it was risky. It was dangerous. I was talking like an old-world film star, and I was like, “They're going to be looking at me like, 'What's he doing?'" But it was one of the rare times when the vision I had in my imagination actually manifested exactly as I had hoped, and I didn’t know it would until I saw all eight episodes.

Did you binge a bunch of those old movies before doing the show?

You better believe it. I was looking at “The Big Sleep” by Howard Hawks, that fast-talking repartee. I was enjoying the way Bogart seemed to be bemused by the wickedness in the other characters: He would actually laugh when somebody was doing something a little bit naughty. I try to put some of that in a piano scene with Li Jun Li. “Casablanca,” “In a Lonely Place, “The Big Heat” with Glenn Ford, “Double Indemnity” with Fred McMurray. I'm a big Edward G. Robinson fan, I wanted to do a whole sequence where I was channeling that guy.

When you have these eight episodes, you have the time to plant these little seeds, and then actually explain that he was going to the movies to try to reprogram himself to be more human because he has this arachnid DNA coursing through his veins.

Nicolas Cage watched a bunch of old movies to prepare for his role as a superhero gumshoe in "Spider-Noir."

There are moments where you throw in the odd tic or insect-y movement. Did you come up with those?

I did. But to their credit, the powers that be let me do it and built on it. I remember meeting with Sam Raimi when he wanted me to play Green Goblin (in 2002’s “Spider-Man”), and I said, “Well, I'm going to go do ‘Adaptation,’ but whoever you get to play Spider-Man, it would really be great to have one scene where he's alone in his room, climbing the walls or behaving like a spider.” I was a big fan of [Jeff] Goldblum in “The Fly.” And so I thought, with this, I could work with the animality and try to do some arachnid moves in the privacy of his own apartment, or when he's first trying to come to terms with this thing in his body, making him move in strange ways. All that sort of German expressionistic behavior was just my kind of ontological idea of being a spider.

You're a well-known Superman fan. Was Spider-Man also a favorite growing up?

I learned to love Spider-Man, or understand the appeal of that character, much later. He's an acrobat. He's a trapeze artist. The web thing is interesting, and the teenager element is interesting; that's so empowering for people of that age to have a character that they can respond to. But Spider-Man was not what I was reading as a child. I was interested in the monsters. I was interested in Ghost Rider. I was interested in the Hulk, because for me, and it was a brief period of time where all I was doing was going to comic book stores, those characters were my first understanding of philosophy: How could something that scary also be meant to be doing good? This is complicated. That's "Noir", too, because nothing's perfectly good in "Noir". Everything is a little chiaroscuro. And that's more authentic, I think.

The Spider (Nicolas Cage) is ready for a brawl, even in black and white, in "Spider-Noir."

Viewers can watch “Spider-Noir” episodes in black and white or color. Which do you prefer?

For me, I designed my performance to fit in the black and white format. I knew that the studio might be nervous, and there was a little trepidation about doing it. I said, “You don't only have to do it in black and white. There are teenagers. I understand why you might want to do it in color, because these teenagers don't have the experience with black and white that an older film enthusiast such as myself would have.”

I am convinced that within five minutes of watching the black and white format, they will be hooked. What would be even better is if they see the references, they open the treasure box to this wealth of great American cinema, and they start watching these old black and white movies again. That would be the dream.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Spider-Noir' star Nicholas Cage talks classic movies, insect movement

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”