Few superhero franchises continue to dominate pop culture like Spider-Man. With upcoming films like Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse building up hype, Sony is now expanding the web-slinger’s universe onto streaming with MGM+ and Prime Video’s new live-action series, Spider-Noir, developed by Oren Uziel.
Developed by Oren Uziel, this 1930s-set noir thriller stars Nicolas Cage as Ben Reilly, a private investigator who has long abandoned his masked alter-ego, “The Spider.” However, when superpowered criminals emerge in New York City, Reilly must confront his past and become a superhero once again.
In an interview with Digital Trends, Uziel discusses taking on Spider-Noir as a first-time showrunner, collaborating with Cage, and crafting a Spider-Man story unlike any other.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Digital Trends: Thank you so much for meeting with me today. It’s a pleasure to meet you.
Uziel: Nice to meet you.
Digital Trends: Thank you. Now, how you doing today?
Uziel: I’m good. I’m good. Excited to be in New York. Yeah, it’s a great city. I haven’t been back in a while.
Digital Trends: All right. Now, you’ve worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood for quite a while now, but Spider-Noir is actually the first TV show that you served on as a showrunner. I’d love to hear more about what the experience was like for you.
Uziel: It was oddly smooth and incredibly challenging. I made the pitch, wrote the pilot, started the room, started to prep. It all happened in the order it was supposed to happen. There weren’t huge delays. But, yeah, showrunning is a massive undertaking.
I had a co-showrunner, which was nice and definitely helped because he was seasoned and could help guide me a little bit… I’ve been doing this for a long time. I know most things, but TV, it turns out, is fairly similar to features. Just more episodes and more infrastructure to deal with. But it’s a lot. It’s an overwhelming job, show running.
Digital Trends: Now, why did you choose to helm Spider-Noir?
Uziel: I love noir. I’m a real junkie for it, and I love Spider-Man. And I was fortunate enough to have worked with Phil [Lord] and Chris [Miller] and Amy [Pascal], the producers on the project, many times in the past…
So when they came to me with one that was Spider-Man, combined with noir. It was like a live-action set in New York, and then also set in the 30s, which is like, just a deco kind of romantic era. I was pretty sold on it, and it felt like the first TV opportunity that I really wanted to do with the passion that you need if you’re going to do it.
Digital Trends: I absolutely love the style and execution of Spider-Noir, and so I’d love to know, what were your specific inspirations for writing the show, both from in and outside the comics? What’s a sort of story were you trying to tell?
Uziel: Well, it’s definitely the collision of these two genres… It’s not drawn from the comic book world exclusively, and it’s not drawn from the noir world exclusively. I think we were sort of noir forward, and because of both the setting and that type of storytelling. [What] we talked about a lot, in the making of the show, was, “What if you made a [Humphrey] Bogart movie where Bogart just happened to be Spider-Man?”
So, you’ve got your classic private detective story, but then, “How are you going to subvert all the expectations?” Well, it’s a lot easier to do when this guy happens to have powers that a normal private detective wouldn’t.
And then, on the flip side, you’re telling a Spider-Man story that hasn’t been told before because he’s way older than we’ve ever seen him, and he’s dealing with very different issues and problems than a high school kid.
Digital Trends: Now with Nic Cage in the lead role. He’s really well known for being an intense actor. So what was it like working with him on this series? What sets them apart from all the other Spider-People that we’ve seen on film and television so far?
Uziel: There’s a few things. He is older, right? He’s not a kid…Nic is incredibly prepared. A professional actor. I think sometimes you can think, “Oh, it’s Nic Cage? He’s going to be like this big, larger life character.” He’s kind of a straightforward…a quiet guy sometimes, and very thoughtful.
And so, he read the material, responded [to] the material, and then got off-book immediately. By the table read, he knew every script by heart. And so, he just got to work thinking about how to make this character different from all the characters that have come before.
He’s seen Spider-Man a lot. So I think both of us did not want to just do another iteration without making it our own…We thought a lot about what actually happened to [Reilly] and how it changed him to become the Spider. “What if being the Spider is more of a challenge, just in terms of his humanity, than we realize? And what if he’s become more Spider than man, and how that affects you…to the way you live your daily life?”
Digital Trends: Right. I could tell Nic really gave it his all with his performance, and yet, he was like having the time of his life, and personally, I think it’s like one of his best performances so far.
Uziel: Oh, thanks. I really think he, given this space, he was apprehensive about TV, because I think he was sort of thinking almost like by sitcoms or this or that, but I think once he realized what we were trying to do, he really got excited and got on board, and every single day he would come to set with another reference of something he wanted to do, and it’s always so smart and thoughtful.
So you’d have little bits like, ‘This is sort of a little bit of Bogart from The Big Sleep. This is a little bit of [James] Cagney. There’s a little bit of Peter Lorre. There’s a little bit of Edward G. Robinson.” And so, it was always…haunted by the heroes of noir’s past.
Digital Trends: Awesome. Now, these days, it’s no secret that there are a lot of comic book movies and TV shows. Some people have said that superhero fatigue has set in. So, in this age of so many superhero projects, what sets Spider Noir apart from all the others? Why should people go and see this show?
Uziel: I think sometimes you get lucky with your timing, and if you have superhero fatigue and you don’t want your sort of standard superhero show, this is the show for you. And if you aren’t even that interested in superheroes, this is the show for you because it’s so steeped in film history and cinema and noir. That is really just a story about characters and love and loss and friendship. I’m confident to say that there’s no chance you’ve seen a superhero show like this.
Digital Trends: Now I’ve seen that you’ve worked with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller…you’ve worked with them before writing 22 Jump Street. How did it feel to collaborate with them again on this big project?
Uziel: It’s great. It’s great to work with people repeatedly over the years because you just develop a trust and a shorthand. And I think that was very important here because they had hatched the Spider-Verse movies.
They brought Nic on to do the first iteration of this character. And they just know me, and they trust me that, just in talking about what I wanted to do and what story I wanted to tell, when they got busy with Project Hail Mary…it wasn’t an issue at all. They were able to kind of let me tell the story I wanted to tell and help me when I needed help…with my vision. Because they’re really good collaborators.
Digital Trends: That’s terrific. I just like love it when filmmakers and creatives have a community that they just like work together on so many projects together, and I’m really glad they were really supportive with you on this show. And I think the show really just came out spectacularly well.
Uziel: Oh, thanks. Appreciate that.
Digital Trends: Do you have any plans for a second season of Spider-Noir? I can see the story go far beyond at least what I’ve seen so far.
Uziel: Yeah, there’s definitely [an] opportunity to take this story and go a lot further with it. I think we’re gonna wait and see what happens. But I’m excited to tell another story. For sure.
Digital Trends: Fantastic. Do you have any other stories that you’re working on at this moment?
Uziel: I’m working right now on Murder, She Wrote for Universal with Jamie Lee Curtis, and I’m working on Puss in Boots 3 for DreamWorks.
Digital Trends: All right, fantastic. I’m looking forward to seeing both of those.
Uziel: Yeah, it’ll be fun.
Digital Trends: I just want to say I’m in love with the visuals that you came up with for [Spider-Noir]. It looks like it just came out from a page of a comic book with the images on top of each other. I thought it was so inventive, and I think that really makes it stand out. Is there anything you want to say about that?
Uziel: Well, we shot in LA, and so we kind of had the best crew I think I could have ever hoped for. Darren Tiernan and Peter Deming, our two DPs, are brilliant. And we just worked very hard to make everything as pushed and visually inventive and interesting as possible.
We wanted this to feel as cinematic and large-scale as we could possibly get it. So I’m glad to hear you are feeling that [while] watching it, because it was a labor of love for everybody.
Spider-Noir premieres on MGM+ and Prime Video on May 27.