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This article samples interviews from the newest issue of DEN OF GEEK magazine. Find out how you can subscribe to get the full physical copy right here!
They don’t call him your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man for nothing. The adventures of Peter Parker, aka the guy in the red and blue costume, can be traumatic, they can be angst-ridden in that way every young adult knows, and they can even flirt with tragedy. But more often than not, there’s a reason his main comic line has Amazing in the title. It’s about the joy of youth!
That’s perhaps doubly so for Tom Holland, who’s donned the Web-Head’s mask in six previous Marvel Studios films. And yet, as Holland and his co-stars in this month’s upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day tease in the latest Den of Geek cover story, that appears to be changing with the first Spidey film to deal with the character confronting the totality of adulthood… and the lingering effects of burying a parental figure like Marisa Tomei’s May Parker.
“We’re dealing with a dark version of Spider-Man, where he’s closing himself off and trying to figure out who he is,” actor Jon Bernthal revealed while discussing the addition of the Punisher to the onscreen Spider-Man mythos. The character of the Punisher of course first appeared in a Spidey comic (1974’s The Amazing Spider-Man #129 to be exact), but Bernthal’s version of despondent vigilante Frank Castle has been a decidedly R-rated affair on various Netflix and Disney+ shows. Yet Bernthal thinks Castle will meet Spidey somewhere perfectly in the middle during this month’s PG-13 superhero extravaganza.
“Frank doesn’t buy into all this stuff,” Bernthal said. “He’s a level guy and he gets frustrated with all this superhero stuff. But there’s a sense of mutual respect with Spider-Man. Frank knows that Spider-Man can do things that he can’t. Spider-Man’s embracing darkness in his life, and, as someone who’s been down that road, Frank doesn’t love that for anybody. It cracks open Frank’s heart. He’s begging Spider-Man not to go to the places he goes.”
Confronting those darker elements of Peter Parker makes sense, as it’s always been the B-side of the Spider-Man comics where Peter has had to deal with burying friends and family at a young age, and the weight of doing the right thing in a world that doesn’t care. Brand New Day seems to mark a chance for Holland to fully explore those elements which were only beginning to be teased out during the ending of Spider-Man: No Way Home, the film where Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin kills Peter’s aunt and ends with the world forgetting Peter Parker exists because of timey-wimey shenanigans.
“The loss of Aunt May should be devastating,” Holland said in the new issue of Den of Geek. “It should take up the entire third act of [No Way Home]. But we were trying to make something fun and exciting, so he meets these two other Spider-Men, the most iconic Spider-Men. We couldn’t have Tobey [Maguire] and Andrew [Garfield] having the time of their lives while my character’s crying all the time. It wouldn’t have worked… Brand New Day deals with some of those things we had to gloss over in No Way Home.”
Hence in the new movie, we jump ahead five years and find Peter still mourning May, as well the loss of his great love in MJ (Zendaya) and best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon), and how their absence leaves Peter in a place where he and Punisher can connect. For actors with so much history working together like Holland, Zendaya, and Batalon, all of the above creates unique acting challenges.
“Honestly, we felt bad for Tom,” Zendaya laughed. “Jacob and I are just having a good time, minding our business. And Tom, bless him, is standing off in a corner alone, staring at us from afar! It was like an acting exercise, to play as if you’ve never met this person before. We had to imagine this life that Ned and MJ had without Peter’s presence.”
It’s an interesting note, as is playing these characters at the end of their academic careers. No previous live-action Spider-Man movies has ever reached that point in a young person’s life when the full horizon after school stands before them. It can be an exhilarating time for some. For others, perhaps, a darker one. Although the way director Destin Daniel Cretton framed it, this is less about darkness as that universal anxiety that accompanies uncertainty.
“Brand New Day has a more mature Spider-Man, but I don’t like the word ‘darker,’” Cretton asserted. “Spider-Man isn’t Batman… When I graduated from college, I had a communications degree and no job prospects. I struggled through my 20s, sharing an apartment with three to eight guys, all of us looking for work. The reality of the world hit me in the face. In that stage, I learned what it really feels like to lose someone, to go through sadness and darker times, and I learned what was important in life for the first time. That’s the stage that Peter Parker happens to be going through.”
Audiences will soon learn for themselves what shades of light, and dark, Brand New Day weaves in its web when the movie opens on Friday, July 31. In the meantime, you can subscribe and get your own physical copy of the Den of Geek magazine with our complete conversations with Holland, Zendaya, Bernthal, and Cretton right here.
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