The Spider-Men That Time Forgot

When you think of Spider-Man, which actor comes to mind? For many, the answer is Tobey Maguire, the first actor to play the role on the silver screen. For the young folks today, it’s Tom Holland, who met his now-wife on the set of Spider-Man: Homecoming almost 10 years ago. And for that slice of people in between who hover between the millennials and zoomers, it’s Andrew Garfield’s Amazing Spider-Man duology. These three are so recognizable as Peter Parkers (Peters Parker?) that they joined forces in the multiversal epic Spider-Man: No Way Home.

But there’s much more to Spider-Man than just this arachnid trilogy. They’re neither the first nor the last actors to take on this role, and the foundations of their performances — the very fabric of Spider-Man as we know it — contribute just as much as the faces on the movie posters. In fact, more than 20 actors have portrayed the hero, and that’s not counting the Spider-Verse variants. Inverse spoke to two different Spider-Man actors, one from the past, one from the present, to break down just what makes this character tick.

Spider-Man Past

The first onscreen Spider-Man was Danny Seagren, who played the hero on the 1970s PBS series The Electric Company. That said, the first time Peter Parker got his own TV show was in 1977, when The Amazing Spider-Man premiered on CBS. The series starred Nicholas Hammond as Peter Parker, a chemistry graduate student working part-time as a photographer for the Daily Bugle.

Hammond, then best known for playing the second-oldest von Trapp child in The Sound of Music and a one-episode role in The Brady Bunch, didn’t really know what to expect from such a superhero series. “I didn’t really know much about Spider-Man,” he tells Inverse. “And I thought, ‘Well, they’re going to want some huge guy with huge muscles who looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger.’”

Hammond, a lanky 20-something with a classic 1970s swoopy hairdo, didn’t consider himself even a contender. “But they said, ‘No, no, no. We don't want that. We want a guy who looks like he could disappear in a crowd and you wouldn't notice him.’”

In the series’ feature-length pilot episode, Peter is helping a friend with an experiment involving radioactivity when a spider climbs into the chamber and later bites his hand. He then discovers he has spiderlike powers, including the ability to climb up walls and “spidey sense” prophetic visions, shown through eerie red and blue lights on his eyes.

“We couldn't have a lot of fantasy characters,” he explains. “The bad guys who could fly through the air and disappear and make things explode and all that. You just don't have the budget on a weekly television show.”

This limitation actually turned out to be the series’ greatest strength — without the budget to do fantastical villains, the show had no choice but to focus on lesser but more realistic threats.

“We weren't trying to make it camp like the old Batman had been. We were trying to actually make a legitimate show. And I thought, looking back on it, I think we did episodes about nuclear waste and about cloning and corruption with illegal movement of goods between countries. And I think, well, those were all absolutely legitimate things. And a lot of them, like cloning and nuclear waste, really no one else had really talked about those things at that point.”

Another boon to being one of the first Marvel TV series is the feedback from the big man himself, Stan Lee. But Lee wasn’t as thrilled about the grounded nature as Hammond was. In fact, he appeared on TV saying, “It wasn’t as good as it should have been, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.”

“I had to say, ‘Stan, we're doing the character you wrote, but we're doing that character in a completely different set of circumstances,’” Hammond reflects. “‘And that's just what the show is.’ He eventually embraced it, but it took him a long time.”

Almost 50 years later, Hammond is still recognized as some fans’ “first Spider-Man,” and it’s something he’s proud of to this day. In fact, outside of the United States, episodes of Amazing Spider-Man were released in theaters, so for international viewers, he’s the original movie Spider-Man.

Spider-Man Future

Currently, Tom Holland plays Spider-Man for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but he’s not the only one. In What If…?, Marvel Zombies, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, and everything else off the silver screen, Marvel turns to Hudson Thames, who has provided the voice for Spider-Man for years. This is a much different situation than Nicholas Hammond. There’s nothing but precedent for him, and his performance is inevitably going to be compared to Holland’s.

“I was so scared because you know how this whole world is that there's so many things to get right and characters,” Thames tells Inverse. “But honestly, everyone has been so supportive and incredible. It's been really awesome.”

In fact, the Spider-Man fan community has actually helped him do his research into the Spider-Man stories that came before. “The first panel that I did, I remember being like, ‘Whoa, this goes so deep, and I don't know any of this stuff. I need help,’” Thames says. “The fans have really taught me; it's like a dialogue that I feel like I have with fans and the studio has with fans. Their opinion is taken into consideration in a way that's very specific to this world.”

But how do you step into the shoes of not only this massively popular character but also replace a very specific (and very beloved) actor’s performance? For Thames, it was a long and slow process. “In my earlier experience with this role, I wasn't sure what the audience was expecting. So I tailored things to sound more like Tom in the inflections and stuff,” he says. Then came Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, the Disney+ animated series following a brand new version of Peter Parker. “I said, ‘Is this something that I can play with and do my thing with?’ And they were like, ‘Absolutely.’”

Thames’ involvement may have been the result of contract issues, as Tom Holland’s contract only covers features, and Sony only allows Marvel to use the character for half-hour animation, but the freedom in his performance provides a new take on the character we never would have seen otherwise.

The Rest Of The Spidey Squad

Of course, these two are just the bookends in a long, long line of Spider-Men actors. Less than a year after CBS’ Amazing Spider-Man series premiered, Spider-Man, a Japanese series, premiered starring Shinji Tōdō as Takuya Yamashiro, a motorcycle racer who finds a crashed spaceship from Planet Spider. Instead of being bitten by a radioactive spider, Takuya is injected with the blood of the last survivor of the crash, giving him the powers of a spider.

Before shooting began, Tōdō and the crew watched the pilot movie of The Amazing Spider-Man. “I loved it,” Tōdō said in the episode of Marvel’s 616 focused on the series. “He was so human.” However, the Japanese version was very different, introducing himself as an “emissary from hell” and piloting a transforming robot named Leopardon. Still, it’s something close to Tōdō’s heart. “He wasn’t a conventional hero, which was thrilling to me,” he said. “I still get chills thinking about it.”

There are also a whole host of other voice actors who have lent their talents to the role, including Critical Role’s Robbie Daymond and Drake and Josh’s Drake Bell, but there are also a number of voice actors whose claim to fame is behind the mask, like Dan Gilvezan and Christopher Daniel Barnes. And no conversation of Spider-Men in the dustbin of history would be complete without mentioning Reeve Carney, who originated the role of Peter Parker in the short-lived (and rumored to be cursed) production of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the 2011 Broadway musical.

What Makes Spider-Man Spider-Man?

Peter Parker is a street-level superhero, unlike many others at the time who had origin stories involving otherworldly pasts and supernatural gifts. He’s fighting crime in dark alleys, but he’s also suffering all the problems of a young man in the city, no matter if that’s high school bullies or an overbearing boss at the Daily Bugle.

Despite — or maybe even because of — this, he’s not someone who takes himself super seriously. This element traces back all the way to Hammond’s performance back in the ’70s.

“When I first make my first Spider-Man suit up in the attic of Aunt May's house, we just shot it with me standing in front of the mirror, and I said to the director, ‘Well, that's just a guy standing there with a Spider-Man suit on. How are they going to know that that's actually me inside that suit?’” Hammond says. “So I came up with an idea. I said, ‘Why don't I stand in front of the mirror and then just slowly pull off the mask and look at myself in the mirror and just go into roars of laughter? Is that not the funniest thing in the world?’ They shot it and loved it.”

That, in a nutshell, is Spider-Man’s ethos. He’s a young man with a lot of great power and therefore a lot of great responsibility, but he’s in touch with his human nature as much as his Spidey Senses.

“My favorite part of this job is that it, in the best way, makes me feel like I'm 15 again, and when I was 15, I didn't overthink everything. I just enjoyed my life,” Thames reveals. “There's a freedom and a joy in living in that age all the time. And I think Peter is so fumbling and silly and just present in his crazy way. I just try to remember how it felt to be that age.”