We live in an era where getting a good Spider-Man adaptation isn't something in scarcity. There isn't just one movie or one series of films that impresses fans, but a lot more.
From the animated Spiderverse trilogy, to the Tom Holland franchise and the games, there's a lot.
With Spider-Noir, not only do we get to dive into the past, but we also get Nicholas Cage as Ben Reilly. As if you couldn't ask for more, the actor's inspiration behind doing a TV show was none other than Breaking Bad.
Breaking Bad was Nicholas Cage's Inspiration for Spider-Noir
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This isn't Nicholas Cage's first rodeo as a superhero. Before he made his debut as Spider-Noir in Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, he was the iconic Ghost Rider, and he briefly appeared as Superman in Ezra Miller's Flash. Speaking with Variety, he revealed what convinced him to work in a television series.
"I was adamant about not doing television ... [then] my son showed me Breaking Bad. I began to see that the actors in that show were afforded the luxury of time to tell their story."
He continued, "I saw Bryan Cranston staring at a suitcase for what seemed like minutes. I couldn't take my eyes off him, and all he was doing was staring at a suitcase, and it occurred to me that you can't do that in movies: You don't have the time. I thought, maybe with an eight-hour narrative I can start planting seeds for a character that can bloom into something that I don't have the luxury of time to do in a movie. That was the main attraction."
It wasn't until Spider-Noir that he finally found something worth switching mediums for. "I waited for something that I thought would be special, and I can tell you that with Spider-Noir, the vision that I had in my imagination manifested in the exact way that I'd hoped."
However, it wasn't easy for him. "It was scary, and it was risky. I was constantly worried that I was going to get fired, because I was doing this thing of channelling old actors and colliding it with Stan Lee's masterpiece that is "Spider-Man" to create this Roy Lichtenstein pop-art sensation of sorts. I didn't know until I finally saw the eight episodes whether it was going to work."
He constantly kept thinking that he was doing something wrong. Cage was out of his element and while he had familiarised himself with his character, it wasn't easy. It was Bryan Cranston's performance that really kept him going.