Everyone who read Spider-Noir creator Oren Uziel's scripts agreed on one thing: Janet Ruiz, Spider-Man's wise-cracking secretary, was their favourite character. But after more than 1,300 auditions, it seemed he might never find her.
"Everyone kept telling me 'We can't wait to see Janet,'" Uziel says. "But everybody instantly created their own picture in their head of who Janet was."
And none of those pictures quite matched the idea that Uziel had for the show, which reimagines Spider-Man in a classic Hollywood setting, turning the web-slinger into a down-on-his-luck detective named Ben Reilly, somewhere between The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon.
Janet, meanwhile, recalls the fast-talking heroines of screwball comedies such as His Girl Friday. Uziel's affection for that world runs deep – one of his daughters is named Hildy, after the film's lead character.
But Uziel never wanted this to be a mere pastiche. To make it all work, Janet also had to be the show's heart – she had to feel real. And he finally found that in Karen Rodriguez.
"It was wild. He said to me, 'We saw over 1300 people, I personally saw 700 of them, and you're it,'" Rodriguez tells The National. "I was like – 'gulp'."
The breakthrough came when Rodriguez started looking past Janet's charming surface-level attitude. She was not there to trade barbs or keep the detective story moving. She was there for something deeper.
"For whatever reason, I just knew that this woman had a lot of love for Ben Reilly," Rodriguez says.
That became the answer to the question at the centre of Janet: Why, after everything Ben puts himself through, does she stay?
"It wasn't about fixing him," Rodriguez says. "It was about a friend who's showing up in a dark time and not leaving. That's when you show up, not when you leave. I just knew that was her value system."
And while Janet may have been the hardest to crack, she was far from the only challenge. For each character who embodied a stock-genre figure, Uziel said the creative team spent much of the production trying to avoid simply recreating those archetypes.
Li Jun Li faced a similar question about Felicia Hardy. On paper, the nightclub singer and owner resembles one of noir's most familiar character types. But Li says she has never seen Hardy as a traditional femme fatale.
"I think her situation – and the broader truth of the show – something that we relate to," she says. "Most of us, if not all of us, are very good people who are dealt with difficult cards, and we all have to make very difficult, morally difficult decisions that could potentially hurt other people."
Felicia's contradictions are what make her feel real, Li believes.
"She is innately a good person," she says. "She's flawed and very lonely, and she just wants to save the people that she loves."
Uziel tried to imbue Ben with just as much complexity. As a result, one of his first decisions was to age Spider-Man so that the character could grapple with weightier themes.
"We've seen the Peter Parker high school origin story a number of times now," he says. "It was nice to get an opportunity to tell a story about what happens to someone who might've experienced something like that as a younger person now all these years later."
As a result, Ben is older, more cynical and increasingly determined to leave his past behind.
"He's doing everything that he can to get out of who he is and deny who he is," Uziel says. "But you can't escape who you are."
That version of Spider-Man needed an actor who could carry the familiar pieces of the character while making him feel stranger, older and more volatile. Uziel's first choice was Nicolas Cage, who had previously voiced Spider-Man Noir in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and its follow-up Across the Spider-verse.
Lamorne Morris, who plays journalist Robbie Robertson, saw Cage’s impact even when the cameras were not rolling.
One day, the pair were leaving the wardrobe when Morris mentioned he had recently watched a horror film in which Cage plays a serial killer.
"He goes, 'Spit it out, what is it?'" Morris recalls. "And I said, Longlegs."
Cage immediately slipped back into the character's voice. "He's so aware. He knows he's Nic Cage," Morris says. A woman in the elevator witnessed the exchange.
"You could tell she was living her best life," Morris says. "We got off the elevator, and as we walked away, I turned around and she was immediately on her phone, like, 'Oh my God.'"
That sense of unpredictability made the set experience thrilling. "There are times when we're shooting that you have to check yourself or catch yourself," Morris says. "You're like, hey, listen, I'm a member of this cast too, I'm not just a fan."
Morris may have been a fan on set, but it is clear he is not the only one. Since it premiered last Wednesday, Spider-Noir has reached number one on Prime Video in 23 countries and the top three in more than 50 territories.
In Morris's eyes, that's a testament to a series that has real substance beneath all its genre-mashup quirkiness.
"I think it reveals the human spirit and the beating heart that lies inside of even the most jaded of characters and heroes," says Uziel. "I think it will surprise audiences how much fun film noir can be."
Spider-Noir season one is now available on Prime Video
