Prime Video and MGM+’s Spider-Noir will make its debut on Monday, May 25, bringing the iconic Marvel character to life in a stylish live-action noir thriller starring Nicolas Cage, Brendan Gleeson, Lamorne Morris, Jack Huston, Abraham Popoola, and Li Jun Li. Set in a shadowy 1930s New York crawling with grifters, gumshoes, and two-bit crooks, the series follows an aging private eye forced to confront his past life as the city’s one and only masked hero, The Spider.
In the series, Spidey’s notorious rogue’s gallery of baddies gets a hard-boiled makeover for the shadowy 1930s setting, with famed villains like Sandman, Tombstone, and Silvermane reimagined as underworld mugs and big-shot gangsters straight out of a pulp crime rag.
Talking to Brendan Gleeson about his noir take on Silvio Manfredi, better known as Silvermane, the actor explained why he viewed the ruthless kingpin not just as a philosopher, but as someone with the streetwise instincts of a Dublin cabbie.
“Well, how much experience have you got with taxi drivers?” asked the veteran actor. “We have quite a lot of Dublin taxi drivers who see themselves as philosophers and will treat you to the benefit of their wisdom and insight on long journeys, when you just want to actually kind of get there.”
“He’s the kind of philosopher that self-justifies, and he actually, in my view, is quite insightful and quite cunning and quite perceptive with regard to human nature and emotional kind of intelligence. He gets how people are, which makes his cruelty all the worse to justify and a little bit more frightening, because even in the knowledge of the consequences of his actions, he does them anyway,” explained Gleeson. “He’s kind of a bit of a philosopher. He will philosophize about how the nature of the world is such that he has no real choice, but he knows and understands that. Of course, he does. So that’s why he’s a villain.”
It is this keen insight, combined with his commanding authority, that makes Silvermane the boss and allows him to keep control over a stable of superpowered lackeys who could easily overpower him at any moment.
“He pushes it a bit far at times, but he keeps control because he assumes an authority. He acts on it without conscience, and so he’s formidable in his mind and in his commitment to villainy and doing things at all costs,” explains the actor. “People do the most extraordinary things for the most horrible people, because there’s some kind of power in not caring, and people recognize it.”
“A lot of it is bluff,” said Gleeson. “I was a teacher for 10 years, and I remember realizing that a lot of this is bluff. If these guys actually decide to take the law into their hands, not going to be an awful lot you can do about it, but you keep them believing that it wouldn’t be a good idea, and so a lot of it is just about mind games, really.”
Spider-Noir, First episode premiere on Monday, May 25 on MGM+; 8-episode drop on May 27 on Prime Video, available in both “authentic black & white” and “true hue” color
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