Since it was first reported nearly a full year ago, one of the big things on everyone’s mind in regard to Spider-Man: No Way Home are its villains. The returning baddies of Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin and Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus from Sam Raimi’s original trilogy and Jamie Foxx’s Electro of the Amazing duology are caught up in some multiversal madness that spells potential trouble for Tom Holland’s Peter Parker.
At Brazil’s CCXP this weekend, the three actors got the chance to talk about their experience returning to the roles they inhabited in the relatively early days of Spider-Man fever that’s swept the world. The initial pitch sold all three of them, but what really appealed to them all was that No Way Home’s characters would be similar to what came before, but different in some aspects. “It’s a return to something I did before with that kind of history,” Dafoe said, “but there’s a spin on it, and that appealed to me.” Foxx echoed his costar’s sentiment, saying that producer Amy Pascal explained how he’d be a little more “hip” than his first run at Electro and to his gratefulness, wouldn’t have to be blue.
Dafoe teased that there’d been “upgrades” provided to his Goblin costume, and the other villains have undergone similar redesigns for No Way Home. Instead of being on-set props like they were in 2004’s Spider-Man 2, Doc Ock’s tentacles are now done digitally, while Foxx called his new look as not trying too hard. “I relate it to R&B,” he said. “Back then, you had fringes or shoulder pads, but now you can just sing.” For Dafoe, there was a comfort in the ease of being fitted compared to the original Spider-Man’s eight-hour test: they just scanned him, created the costume from the scan, and adjusted accordingly.
More than anything, the actors are just excited to play these villains again, who they all say have their own arcs throughout the film. “In a lesser environment, us as villains, we would just be functionaries who exist just to get the plot going,” Molina said. “But here, we’ve got real storylines, and they’re real people.” With that classic sinister smile, Dafoe teased that Green Goblin would “make a case this time…it’s not just about some abstract muscle twirling power grab.”
Spider-Man: No Way Home arrives in theatres on December 16.