Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Yuri Lowenthal said his favorite Spider-Man in movies is Tobey Maguire during interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
Superhero comic books have been a mainstay of popular culture since Action Comics introduced Superman in 1938. The popularity of these characters has waxed and waned over the decades thanks to moral panics and organizations such as the Comics Code Authority, but modern society is more saturated with superhero media than ever. Marvel’s MCU film and television series is a big contributor, but individual characters like Spider-Man have received various live-action iterations well before Marvel Studios’ Iron Man teased the Avenger Initiative in 2008.
DC Comics’ Caped Crusader, Batman, is one of the clearest examples of how successful different takes on a comic book character can be. Fans have long debated the merits of Bruce Wayne performances, from Adam West’s campiness in the 1960s to Robert Pattinson’s more serious turn in 2022’s The Batman. However, merely voiced takes on the character are just as often part of the discussion, with many expressing love for Kevin Conroy in Batman: The Animated Series and Rocksteady’s Arkham games.
Speaking of Spider-Cop, your wife Tara Platt, plays Captain Yuri Watanabe in the game.
Ben (Arfman) was at his wits end trying to figure out a way to make tutorials interesting in the first game, but nothing clicked. He stayed up late the night before the recording and told me, “This isn’t going to work, but we have to record something today.” You never know what’s going to resonate. And then the fact that her name is “Yuri” in the game and it’s my name in real life, but I know it’s my wife…there’s so many layers. It never wasn’t weird.
You also get to play a darker Peter when he has the symbiote.
You ask any actor, “Would you rather play a hero or a villain?,” and they’ll say villain. Playing a villain, you get to be bad and play in that world, but not go to jail. (Laughs.) But I underestimated how hard it would be to make your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, not friendly. I’ve settled into such a zone with Peter to make him the opposite of that…I was drained at the end of sessions, because it was hard pushing Peter and that character into a very unfamiliar and mean place.
When we’re recording a game on a nonlinear schedule, Chris Zimmerman, the performance director, and the rest of the team were always tracking where we were in the story. So sometimes I’d maybe say something too mean or not mean enough, and we’d have to sort of bring me back to where we were on that timeline, which was something we never really had to do. Before, Peter was Peter. He was always saving people. But this brought out a different story.
In Spider-Man 2, Kraven has a more psychological edge with his attacks on Spider-Man, as opposed to Venom and Lizard, who battle Spider-Man in other ways. How does that affect Pete?
It was great for me, because on one hand, we all know Kraven. But Peter, in this world, he doesn’t have a background of Kraven. He’s learning just as we are. You could approach that character as a big guy who’s really strong and has weapons and hunts, but they included the psychological edge with him. So I asked myself, what does it make Peter feel? What direction does it push him? Especially when you add the symbiote element into it, what happens when Kraven threatens somebody that Peter loves? [Insomniac creative director] Bryan [Intihar] always says, “When Peter wins, Spider-Man has to lose. When Spider-Man wins, Peter loses.”
Peter’s relationship with Mary Jane Watson (voiced by Laura Bailey) has grown as well. How does that come into play in this game?
Even though he’s a superhero, Pete still has to grow in his relationship with MJ. Of course thrown in the middle of that, Peter becomes a monster, so how do they weather that? Obviously, she knows it’s not Peter, but some things you can’t take back. How does that leave them in the end? And I’m not going to tell you, so you have to play the game for yourself.
Lowenthal has dabbled in the world of Spider-Man for more than a decade in animation and gaming in titles such as The Amazing Spider-Man 2 mobile game. Then the 2018 Insomniac game Spider-Man changed everything for his relationship with the character when it became a phenomenon, selling 13.8 million copies worldwide. He reprised the role for the 2020 spinoff Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and is now back with Spider-Man 2, which earlier this week set a record as the fastest-selling PlayStation game in the company’s history, with 2.5 million copies sold in the first 24 hours.
The new Mortal Kombat 1 that was released on Sept. 14. You play Smoke in this game, but I’ve heard you didn’t really play it growing up?
Look, who doesn’t know what Mortal Kombat is? I’m old enough to have been pumping quarters into arcades back in the day. When Mortal Kombat came out, everybody was like, what is that? Are you allowed to do that? But that’s probably the last time I played it until IGN! I loved the world though, and I’m probably dating myself, but I used to have a clock radio that woke me up with what was in the CD player. It was always the Mortal Kombat theme from that movie. [Yuri proceeded to impressively sing the Mortal Kombat song, “Techno Syndrome.”]
