Nicolas Cage Hopes ‘Spider-Noir’ Is Your Kid’s Gateway Drug to Humphrey Bogart Movies

IndieWire Honors: The legendary actor, who will receive the Innovation Award at the upcoming TV edition of our awards show, talks blending his myriad influences into a superhero role that nobody else could have played.

On June 4, the IndieWire Honors Spring 2026 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best television series. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the creators, artisans, and performers behind shows well worth toasting. In the days leading up to the Los Angeles event, IndieWire is showcasing their work with new interviews and tributes from their peers.

Without Nicolas Cage, a project like “Spider-Noir” would have been dead on arrival. Even as Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s animated “Spider-Verse” movies continue to showcase the endless versatility of Marvel’s favorite webslinger, the notion of a black-and-white Spider-Man series about a tortured P.I. that’s as indebted to classic film noir as any comic book is a tough sell. But the idea of Cage leading his own version of “The Big Sleep” is enough to intrigue even the most superhero-fatigued audiences. And the actor embraces the great responsibility that accompanies his star power, turning in the kind of manic, genre-bending performance for which he’s singularly equipped.

It makes Cage a fitting recipient of the Innovation Award at this week’s IndieWire Honors. Five decades into one of the great acting careers in Hollywood history, Cage has never stopped trying new things. The Oscar winner was one of the biggest studio movie stars of the ’90s, became the undisputed king of weird 2010s indies who helped countless early-career auteurs get their films of the ground, and is now proving himself capable of hanging with the very best TV stars.

Through it all, Cage has kept a foot in the comic book world. He was famously cast as Superman in Tim Burton’s film that never materialized, and went on to reprise his role from the screen test in a brief cameo in “The Flash.” He then starred in two “Ghost Rider” movies, and even considered playing Green Goblin in Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” before a scheduling conflict with “Adaptation” forced him to turn down the role. But as the actor explained during a recent conversation with IndieWire, he evaluates those roles with the same rigor as his less heroic fare — and only signs on if they interest him on a human level.

“The superhero phenomenon, if you will, was most interesting to me when I was 11 years old,” Cage said, recalling his childhood fascination with “The Incredible Hulk” comics that eventually gave way to more adult interests. “But I’m not really interested in superheroes. I’m interested in the psyche. I’m interested in film performance and I’m interested in acting and different styles of acting. Whether it’s comedy or drama or action adventure or whether it’s old style acting or kabuki or opera, I’m interested in all of it. I love it all, but I’m always looking for something new to explore and to do. And so with ‘Spider-Noir,’ it’s one of the rare maybe two or three times where this vision in my imagination manifested exactly as I had hoped.”

Cage said that vision started to take shape when Amy Pascal called him two years after the success of “Into the Spider-Verse” and pitched him on the idea of reviving the Spider-Man Noir character that he voiced in a live-action format. Cage was immediately intrigued, although he understood that turning a sparsely-used cartoon character into a protagonist capable of carrying an entire show meant that he wasn’t reprising a role so much as building something new.

“I thought that the sketch, if you will, was established on the ‘Spider-Verse’ animated movie, but now because there’s more time and I’m actually on camera, it couldn’t be a sketch anymore,” he said. “It had to go a little deeper and it had to have more complexity and it had to entertain you with a long format. And the trick was not to have it wear out its welcome or become like an impression or a comedy sketch. It had to breathe.”

That task, combined with the fact that “Spider-Noir” would be his first episodic role, gave Cage one of the richest canvases of his acting career. His take on Ben Reilly (also known as The Spider) is both a Mid-Atlantic caricature of film noir protagonists and a Cronenberg-esque creature who blends spider and man more literally than any version of that Marvel character we’ve ever seen. (Cage cites Jeff Goldblum’s performance in “The Fly” as one of his biggest inspirations for the role.) It’s a Cage performance for the ages, taking the creativity of his best indie work and fitting it into an I.P.-driven project that millions will watch.

“How can I take this black and white noir style of film performance and collide it with Stan Lee’s masterpiece, Spider-Man, and create this spark of something new and something fresh?,” he recalled asking himself, eventually finding the answer to his own question within his deep reserves of film knowledge. “You go to those little places in your memory Rolodex or your library of experience and you try to find the emotion that you can inform through the filter of the noir style of acting, that fast talking acting and bring the pathos, if you will. All of that, and also the physiology, the arachnid physiology, all of that was different levels than you saw in the ‘Spider-Verse.'”

Cage cites films like “The Big Sleep,” “The Maltese Falcon,” “Casablanca,” “In a Lonely Place,” “He Walked By Night,” and “Double Indemnity” as influences on his performance. He explained that he was drawn to the contrasting emotional extremes required to fit a performance into the black-and-white color palette.

“These are all black-and-white movies,” he said. “They have a style to the acting and it fits within the beautiful cinematography and the lighting. The Chiaroscuro style of acting, which is also a fast-paced style. And then no one’s perfectly good in war. Everyone has a little bit of a bad story to tell, which makes it more human, more authentic.”

While Cage’s affection for the entire pantheon of American film noir stars is apparent, he kept turning back to Bogart, picking up on subtle nuances in the actor’s style that paid dividends in “Spider-Noir.”

“One of the things I noticed about Bogart in ‘The Big Sleep’ was that he seemed to be so bemused whenever anybody was doing anything naughty, particularly the femme fatales. When they were doing something that was a little bit wicked, most people are like, ‘Oh, you’re going to hurt me.’ But he would start laughing, and I thought that was so fun to watch,” Cage said. “And so I tried to put a little of that with Li Jun Li in the scene with the piano. I think it was the first episode and there’s that, ‘Oh, you’re good. And obvious.’ All that kind of stuff was that flavor that I watched Bogart do, which I thought was so much fun.”

Cage has not been shy in recent years about his desire to eventually leave movies behind and focus on the long-form acting opportunities that television offers. Now that he’s tried the new medium, Cage says that remains partially true. While he’s keen to do more TV, he explained that scratching one creative itch simply creates new ones.

“Doing a season of television makes me interested in movies again. So I knew I had to try something else to reinvigorate and restimulate my process. And now I’ve done this and I’m happy with the results and I feel like I’ve learned something. I also feel like I have a little more confidence and I could see myself making more movies again,” he said. “Yet, what’s next? I mean, maybe a musical or maybe I try some stage work. I don’t know. But whatever it is, the older I get, the harder it is to stay interested. So I have to keep pushing myself to find new sounds, new images to create.”

But Cage also made it clear that part of the appeal of television is the potential it brings to reach larger audiences. He recalled the way his late friend David Lynch introduced his distinct brand of surrealism to the masses with “Twin Peaks” and expressed hope that “Spider-Noir” could spark a renaissance in classic noir. He always envisioned the project as a black-and-white show, but embraced its multi-format release strategy with the hope that watching episodes in color might make it easier for younger audiences to dip their toes into the dormant genre.

That sentiment encapsulates the timelessness of Nicolas Cage. His reverence for Hollywood history is apparent, and his endless study of past art makes him one of the most exciting performers of our present.

“Television is a marvelous tool to be able to introduce different generations and different audiences to different styles. And so in this case, I’m hopeful about that 1930s noir style of acting, and it is a style. I said to [former Amazon Studios head] Jen Salke when I met her, ‘Just because the 13-year-old doesn’t know who Humphrey Bogart is doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. The point is it works, it communicates and they’re going to get it.’ So if you can do that and interest other generations to watch the old movies again and discover this wealth of American cinema that we have, I mean, I think that’s only going to make them want to make great movies in the future.”

“Spider-Noir” is now streaming on Amazon Prime.