Spider-Noir showrunner Oren Uziel and producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller say there's a very good reason why Nicolas Cage is playing Ben Reilly instead of classic Spider-Man Peter Parker in Amazon MGM Studios' upcoming Spider-Noir streaming series. As it turns out, it all comes back to the need for the show to have the same hardboiled feel as classic film noir shows, with Peter representing a level of optimism that Spider-Noir doesn't have.
"This character's very different from the Peter Parker from the movies. He's older and jaded, and not afraid to punch a guy in the face drunkenly," Miller tells Esquire, with Lord adding, "He already had his Chinatown disillusionment moment that happened years and years ago."
Lord and Miller have a fairly strong handle on Spider-Noir, as a slightly different version who is Peter Parker appears in their Spider-Verse animated movie series, where he's also voiced by Nicolas Cage. Cage himself said he's bringing a combination of "70 percent Bogart and 30 percent Bugs Bunny" to his portrayal of Reilly as Spider-Man.
"Peter Parker feels very synonymous with a high school kid. Boyish. On his way up," Uziel explains. "Ben Reilly has already gone through the entire arc and has seen it all. He's over it, and trying to move past it. But his past kind of keeps coming back to haunt him. It's just a different version that we haven't seen before."
The character Ben Reilly comes straight from comics, in which he is a clone of Peter Parker who takes on his own identity drawing his first name from Uncle Ben, and his last name from Aunt May's maiden name. He's often operated as Spider-Man instead of or alongside Peter Parker, also sometimes using the name Scarlet Spider. A version of the Scarlet Spider Ben Reilly was voiced by Andy Samberg in the Spider-Verse films.
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