Spider-Man: No Way Home villains on returning to their iconic roles

It may have been a rough holiday season for Peter Parker, but for viewers it was pretty amazing, because Spider-Man: No Way Home finally hit theaters. Doc Ock, the Green Goblin, Sandman, Electro, the Lizard, and Spider-Men past all returned to the big screen alongside Tom Holland’s current iteration of the webslinger in the most anticipated crossover film since Avengers: Infinity War. Spider-Man: No Way Home has been a commercial and critical success, raking in over $1 billion at the global box office.

Despite the fact that rumors were plentiful in the lead up to Marvel and Sony’s latest multiversal crossover event, the studios did a fairly good job of keeping some things under wraps. For example, we knew that Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin, Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus, and Jamie Foxx’s Electro would all be returning in this new movie, but the extent to which these characters featured still came as something of a surprise. These were not cameo appearances, but integral parts of the plot.

As it turns out, that was one of the key reasons that actors like Dafoe agreed to come back in the first place. In a new interview with The New York Times (which is actually three interviews laced together, something that feels very on brand for this film), Dafoe, Molina, and Foxx all reflected on their return to the Spider-Man franchise.

Willem Dafoe didn’t want his return to just be “a series of memes”

“When Amy Pascal [a Spider-Man producer] and Jon Watts [the director of No Way Home] called me up and said we’d like to pitch you this idea, I thought, this is crazy. But let’s see what they have to say,” Dafoe said. “I really didn’t want to do a cameo. I wanted to make sure there was something substantial enough to do that wasn’t just a tip of the hat. And the other thing was, I said I really want there to be action — I want to take part in action scenes. Because that’s really fun for me. It’s the only way to root the character. Otherwise it just becomes a series of memes.”

As anyone who has seen the film knows, Dafoe’s return was central to the film. His turn as Norman Osbourne/the Green Goblin in Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man movie created one of the most iconic villains of this new era of superhero films, and the actor brought that same energy and instability to the part in No Way Home. Osbourne is one of Peter Parker’s central foils in the comics, responsible for the death of his first love Gwen Stacy. Dafoe has made the movie counterpart just as integral a part of the cinematic Spider-verse.

And can I just say, it’s kind of hilarious that Dafoe was worried about his performance becoming reduced to a bunch of memes? Because that suggests the actor is aware that “I’m something of a scientist myself” and the “Do you know how much I sacrificed” board room speech have become prevalent memes. Nonetheless, that scientist line did make its way into the movie…but in a way that felt totally organic and earned.

Adding on to that idea of being aware of the audience, Dafoe talked a bit about the decision to change the Goblin’s aesthetic for this film. “I am aware that there was some criticism of that [Green Goblin] mask in the original [Spider-Man],” the actor said. “We heard it enough that it was probably a consideration, to change it up a little bit. I don’t think about that because I don’t think about emoting with my face. My face follows my heart. It’s just an expression of what you’re feeling.”

Alfred Molina had to take a different approach to Doctor Octopus

Alfred Molina, who played Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man 2 and No Way Home, also remembered how he got involved with No Way Home. “When I got asked to come in for a meeting with [producer Amy Pascal and director Jon Watts], I actually thought it was for a completely different project, maybe to play another villain, or maybe an interview for some retrospective documentary,” he said. “As the years had gone by, I thought, they may well bring Doc Ock back. But I never thought they’d bring him back with me. I was witness to my body changing, things moving. I walked in completely innocent. Like everyone else, I didn’t know the full extent of where the film was going. I didn’t get to read a whole script — I just saw the pages pertinent to me.”

Only getting to see the pages pertinent to him is very much in line with what we’ve heard from other sources about the film. We previously heard from the screenwriters that actors Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire didn’t get to see any pages from the script until late 2020, when the writing team was finalizing the movie’s third act.

Molina also talked about how much the advances in technology changed the way he approached the role. “In my original film, the tentacles — I almost said my tentacles — they were mechanical. They were played by puppeteers who gave them personality. We were like a gang — I dubbed us the Octourage. But this time around, the technology is so much more advanced that the tentacles were computer-generated and I was on my own. That was a whole other way of looking at it.”

Jamie Foxx says Marvel and Sony “kept the mystique alive”

Of all the villains brought back for Spider-Man: No Way Home, perhaps the one the studio had the most opportunity to work with was Electro, played by Jamie Foxx. Foxx’s portrayal of the electrified villain in 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was solid, but the blue design of the character drew criticism, as did his storyline. No Way Home was a chance to reinvent the character.

“You can never look at it that way,” Foxx said, when asked if he ever felt disappointed to see the Spider-Man franchise continue without his character. “If you look at the disappointments of what could have been, you can never do this business.”

"There was a character I played in Baby Driver, his name was Bats. He got killed off, but this was an opportunity to let Bats a little bit in on Electro. He wasn’t like, I want to [expletive] everybody up — I just want to get mine. Everybody flying through the air, looking good, got girlfriends. That now becomes the mantra of Electro."

Foxx also praised how hard Sony and Marvel worked to keep the films countless secrets from getting out ahead of its release — a borderline Herculean feat in today’s digital age. “They were able to keep the mystique alive in a world where mystique doesn’t exist, anywhere. There’s Instagram posts and it’s about how many likes you get. Imagine if Picasso was screenshotting everything, everybody could see it, like, ‘Eh, I don’t want to buy that painting.’ They kept everything under wraps and we all bought into something.”

Regardless of where you fall on the “superhero movies aren’t cinema” debate, there’s no denying that Spider-Man: No Way Home was a true moviegoing event. It combined multiple generations of the Spider-Man film universe into a movie that was also somehow still cohesive and compelling.

Wherever Sony and Marvel take these characters from here, Spider-Man: No Way Home will stand as a towering achievement. And who knows…maybe we’ll see more of these villains yet.

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