Spider-Noir Creator Explains Why Nicolas Cage's Accent Changes Throughout The Show [Exclusive]

This article contains spoilers for Season 1 of "Spider-Noir."

If you've seen all eight episodes of "Spider-Noir," you probably noticed that Nicolas Cage is basically doing a Humphrey Bogart impression when he's playing Ben Reilly, the private investigator and former hero known as "The Spider" (don't call him "Spider-Man"). But Cage's Bogart impression goes in and out seemingly at random; there are moments when Ben Reilly sounds more like Cage himself, or like Bogart's contemporary and noted gangster movie actor James Cagney. There's even a scene in which we see Reilly in a movie theater watching the 1936 movie "Great Guy," speaking Cagney's character's lines aloud as Cagney says them.

In a recent interview, "Spider-Noir" creator/co-showrunner Oren Uziel told me that he filmed several scenes of Reilly watching many different movies, but ultimately settled on "Great Guy" for one particular reason. "['Great Guy'] fit the mold, and it had the best ... we scanned so many movies, and then looking for the right clips that would be fun for him to mimic," he said. "Those lines, and [Cage mimicking them] like, 'Red hot [makes 'sss' noise],' it was perfect."

As we learn late in the season, Ben Reilly was bitten by a man/spider hybrid, the result of German experiments during World War I, and adopts some of the physical characteristics of actual spiders. At one point, he explains that he went to the movies to study actors so he could re-learn how to act more human.

"It's all about his character," Uziel continued. "He becomes The Spider and he becomes more spider than man, and has to learn how to be human. So this is him educating himself. That's him going to the gym, almost. So, it was really fun, and it explains why often he is doing Bogart, or doing Cagney, or doing Peter Lorre. It was so fun."

So Oren Uziel confirmed the stated, in-universe reason for why Nicolas Cage's accent wavers and changes throughout "Spider-Noir." The fact that this reasoning is addressed in the text of the show might be enough for some audiences to accept it. But while I acknowledge that there's a reason for why this choice was made, I don't think the choice works creatively.

On a fundamental level, it's just plain distracting to hear a character sound a certain way in one scene, and then sound notably different in the next. Human beings don't do that, so if Ben Reilly/The Spider is attempting to sound more human, he's doing a poor job creating a convincing facsimile. Even in the heightened world of this show, the eccentricity that Nicolas Cage brings to the part should only give Ben Reilly so much leeway as a character.

Plus, by the time the reveal happens, we've already spent four full episodes listening to this guy slipping in and out of different voices for seemingly no reason. Naturally, TV shows are rife with reveals that recontextualize what we've seen, but in this case, I was so distracted for so much of the show that I was constantly kept at arm's length and couldn't connect to the character the way I was intended to. If this tic was explained in the first episode, maybe I would have been more on Reilly's side. But since that would have messed with the flow of information doled out across the season, the storytellers gambled with a later reveal, and I don't think it paid off here.

I like Cage as a performer (here's /Film's list of Cage's best movies, ranked) and he's a good fit for this part, but I think the whole team may have overthought this one a little too much.