Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse brings us even more Spider-Men than ever before. The film will bring together a multitudes of multiversal Spider-Folk, which requires a multitude of actors to voice them and for one variant in particular, there was only one clear option for co-director Joaquim Dos Santos.
The film brings us back to Miles Morales, who has now really stepped up in his role as Spider-Man in his own world, and is somehow managing to balance it all… until Spider-Gwen drops by once again. Miles is then taken on a rip-roaring ride throughout the multiverse, meeting many iterations of Spider-Man, including Spider-Man India, Spider-Man 2099, and the wildest one of them all, Spider-Punk.
Speaking at a Collider and IMAX event Q&A, Dos Santos, spoke about the casting of the latter and why choosing Get Out actor Daniel Kaluuya was a no-brainer. For many who have seen Kaluuya on screen, you may be used to hearing him adopt an American accent, but he is in fact, British. The actor hails from Camden, London which was known to be the home of punk in the city back in the day. This, along with the actor’s inordinate talent, made him a firm favorite for the casting of Hobie Brown aka. Spider-Punk. Of the Academy Award-winning actor, Dos Santos said:
“Daniel Kaluuya is, I think, one of our great actors of our generation. I was surprised, honestly. You know, when I think of Daniel Kaluuya I think of him speaking in an American accent. We watched these interviews with him and it was just him doing this on a talk show, and we set that against the visuals of Spider-Punk as he was being developed, and just seeing a stagnant image of Spider-Punk set to his voice, it jumped off the page. So, yeah, I could hear the guy talk all day long. I’m gonna understand probably, like, two out of every five words that he says, but I’ll listen to it all day long.”
It will be great to hear the actor speaking in his own voice in a major feature film for once, given that we have all become so used to hearing him use an American accent in films such as Get Out, Nope, and Judas for which he won the Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards. This isn’t the actor’s first time as a Marvel character either, as we met him in the first Black Panther film as Okoye’s husband, W’Kabi.
His character in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is reported to bring the comedy with his quotes on capitalism and oppression scattered throughout the film as well as his enthusiasm for chaos and anarchy. You can go check him, as well as all the other variants, out swinging in theatres now.