Willem Dafoe Had A Specific Request For His Spider-Man: No Way Home Return
A lot of past villains returned for "Spider-Man: No Way Home," but it's safe to say that Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin made the strongest second impression. When the Goblin side of him took over, he was mean and terrifying, even more so than he was back in 2002, but when the Osbourne side was back in control, he was surprisingly sympathetic. He brought a dark, unpredictable energy to the film that Tom Holland's first two "Spider-Man" movies never quite had. The brutality of the Green Goblin helped prevent the film from feeling a little too much like a theme park ride and helped make the movie's cameo-filled nature seem a lot less self-indulgent.
A lot of this came down to Dafoe's insistence that he could get in on the action and that the movie let him be in the fight scenes as much as possible instead of relying too much on CGI. "Listen, I don't want to just pop in there as a cameo or just fill in close-ups," he recalled saying in a 2021 interview about his role. "I want to do the action because that's fun for me."
This is a big part of what made the Green Goblin feel so much more relevant in "No Way Home" than villains like the Sandman (Thomas Hayden Church) or the Lizard (Rhys Ifans), neither of whom actually required their actors to show up on set. Their characters were included via voice work and CGI, which unfortunately led to the two baddies feeling like afterthoughts in the film. The Green Goblin, Doc Ock, and Electro were clearly on a higher level; meanwhile, the Sandman and the Lizard could've been removed entirely and the movie barely would've changed.
The preferred approach
This lack of focus on those other villains wasn't inherently a bad thing — "No Way Home" had so much going on that it sort of needed to prioritize certain villains over others. Still, Dafoe didn't want his character to suffer the same fate.
"It's really impossible to add any integrity or any fun to the character if you don't participate in these things," Dafoe explained, "because all that action stuff informs your relationship to the characters and the story, and also it makes you earn your right to play the character." The result is that Dafoe did about as much stunt work as he did in 2002's "Spider-Man," resulting in some of the best action scenes a live-action Spider-Man has ever fought in. From the attack in the condo to the fistfight by the Statue of Liberty, these sequences are brutal. When Holland's Peter is about to kill Osbourne with his own glider, it feels real and emotional in a way that the movie's Sandman scenes never quite captured.
Dafoe's willingness to film on practical sets definitely paid off, but he's also made it clear over the years that he's not just doing it for the sake of a better movie; it's also just a lot of fun. As he explained to GQ in 2022, being involved in the action scenes is simply a rewarding experience:
"It's fun to do the action sequences, it's fun to have resources. I make a lot of budget-challenged movies, so it's nice to have all the technical stuff to work with. It's really fun to do those things because they're pure. They're pure because what you're doing is what you're doing. And your heart and mind follow."