'Spider-Noir's' Lamorne Morris on why Marvel fans are more intimidating than Nicolas Cage

In the new live-action Prime Video series Spider-Noir, based on the Marvel comic Spider-Man Noir, actor and comedian Lamorne Morris plays a reporter named Robbie Robertson who is best friends with Ben Reilly (played by Nicolas Cage), a private investigator grappling with his superhero past.

Morris is best known for his roles as Winston in the 2010s sitcom New Girl (which he currently co-hosts a rewatch podcast about called The Mess Around), and more recently as a North Dakota deputy in FX’s Fargo, which earned him an Emmy.

In Spider-Noir, Morris told LAist host Julia Paskin that he got to borrow from both experiences, and “play in both the levity and the stakes.”

And while the show is set in a version of 1930s New York City, it was filmed in Los Angeles. Morris noted, “ Downtown L.A. looks probably more like 1930s New York than New York does,” and confirmed a fun tidbit — a real-life bar used as a filming location in the series, The Prince in Koreatown, was also regularly featured in New Girl.

Morris stars alongside Nicolas Cage who Spiderman fans will remember as the voice of a version of Spider-Noir in the 2018 animated film Into the Spider-Verse. The Amazon Prime series does blend in some original comic book characters like Joseph “Robbie” Robertson, played by Morris.

Some highlights of their conversation are below, including why the anticipation of comic book fans’ reactions to the show made him more nervous than meeting Nicolas Cage for the first time.

Entering the MCU, where fans are ‘serious’

While Morris said he welcomes fan reactions to his work, going back to his New Girl days (“ I love when I read fan feedback [...] I'm one of those actors that can appreciate it”) entering the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where fans can be “ real precious about their characters,” did intimidate him a bit.

 ”It being a comic book genre, that's where I feel the pressure because the fans are serious. The fans are like, ‘Hey, don't f--- this up.’ And you're just like, "Okay. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.’ So that pressure is there. We've gotten some pretty cool reviews so far, [but] the ultimate test is what the fans are saying. That's the final boss right there.”

Morris said the advantage of portraying the character of Robbie Robertson was that while there is some information about him in the comic books, and a portrayal of Robertson by the late actor Bill Nunn (who Wilson called “one of the greats”) in the 2000s Spider-Man trilogy of films by director Sam Raimi — there still was some room for Morris to make his own interpretations of the character.

“I got a chance to really make Robbie my own,” Morris said. “Which is all you can ask for.”

A real-life and a fictional inspiration

In doing some research on real-life Black reporters from that era, Morris’s friend brought up reporter Ted Poston, who was the first Black reporter for The New York Post (and only the third Black reporter to work for a major daily New York City newspaper) and was with the paper for more than three decades, from 1936 to 1972.

After finding out about Poston’s life and work, Morris said,  ”uncovering truths and breaking down walls [...]  it was one of those things where I said, ‘Man. I know I'm doing research on Robbie Robertson, but I would love to shed more light on Ted Poston just because he meant so much to culture and he meant so much to the profession of journalism.”

Another inspiration was the 1995 film Devil in a Blue Dress, starring Denzel Washington and Don Cheadle, and based on Walter Mosley’s novel set in post-WWII Los Angeles.

When showrunner Oren Uziel encouraged Morris to lean into an “old-timey” texture and tone for the character’s way of speaking,  paying homage to “the noir of it all, to the black-and-white of it all” (all of the episodes of the series are available in both color and black-and-white) Morris looked for a character from around that time period who wouldn’t sound “too cartoony” or “over the top.”

So he watched Devil in a Blue Dress and studied Washington and Cheadle’s approaches: “They came at it from two different energies. And I thought if I can watch two master actors make two completely different choices, but they both work brilliantly for the film, then [it was] dealer's choice for myself.”

Getting past his own fandom, with Nicolas Cage

When it came to working with Nicolas Cage, Morris said he had to work past his own fandom to get to a place where he could work comfortably.

To do that, Morris said, he tried to get his “million” questions out of his system as quickly as possible — like “What’s it like being Nic Cage?” and “What do you eat for lunch?”

When he went on a weekend trip with friends to New Orleans, Morris said he texted Cage, who he’d heard “bought a haunted hotel or something in New Orleans” — a mansion, it turns out — and asked Cage what they should do.

“The messages I got back in return were insane,” Morris said. “He broke down every restaurant, who to talk to when I got there, where to get the best drinks, where to get this, where to get that.”

Beyond being a lesson that meeting your heroes isn’t always a bad idea, Morris said it also served a purpose for the work they were doing.

 ”What you're doing is you're breaking down those walls so you can remove those nerves,” Morris explained. “When you don't know someone personally and you have to jump right into something where you're best friends, you need to build that chemistry quickly. So for me, that's what it was. It was just being silly, asking him everything.”