Nicolas Cage Had the Chance to Play the Green Goblin and He Has Zero Regrets About Walking Away
Few actors in Hollywood carry as much unpredictable energy as Nicolas Cage, a performer who has spent decades navigating everything from prestige dramas to gleefully over-the-top blockbusters. Cage has spoken openly about his desire to avoid being pigeonholed into a single type of role, balancing heroic and villainous characters with equal enthusiasm throughout his career. That restless, genre-hopping instinct, it turns out, is exactly what once steered him away from one of the most iconic villain roles in superhero movie history.
Long before the superhero genre became the dominant cultural force it is today, Sam Raimi was assembling the cast for what would become a genuine milestone. During the early development of ‘Spider-Man’, multiple major names were in consideration to play the dangerous and unhinged Norman Osborn, with the list reportedly including John Malkovich, Jason Isaacs, and Billy Bob Thornton alongside Cage. According to Emmy Magazine, Raimi personally invited Cage to his Malibu home to pitch the role over lunch, making the discussion a direct and intimate one between the two Hollywood figures.
That conversation ultimately did not lead to a deal. Speaking to PEOPLE at the New York City premiere of his new Prime Video series ‘Spider-Noir’, Cage confirmed he passed on the opportunity to play the Green Goblin, describing it as the right call for where he was in his life at the time. “For me, that was the right choice at the time,” he said. Instead of joining Raimi’s superhero blockbuster, he chose to star in the smaller and more character-driven ‘Adaptation’, directed by Spike Jonze and featuring Meryl Streep and Tilda Swinton.
Cage elaborated on his thinking in a conversation with Emmy Magazine, describing ‘Adaptation’ as “a much smaller noir of sorts, more romantic than tragic noir,” and recalling that he told Raimi he hoped whoever was cast as Spider-Man would truly embrace the physical strangeness of the character. The role of Norman Osborn eventually went to Willem Dafoe, who had actively sought out Raimi after learning he was directing the film, and whose performance became one of the most celebrated villain portrayals the superhero genre has ever seen.
More than two decades later, the poetic twist is that Cage has found his way into the Spider-Man universe after all, and on his own terms. ‘Spider-Noir’ marks his first lead role in a television series, with the eight-episode show premiering globally on Prime Video on May 27 after its domestic debut on MGM+ on May 25. Cage plays Ben Reilly, an aging and down-on-his-luck private investigator in 1930s New York who is forced back into the world of superheroism following a deeply personal tragedy.
The series was developed with the Academy Award-winning team behind ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’, including Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and Amy Pascal, and is produced by Sony Pictures Television for MGM+ and Prime Video. Cage had previously voiced the Spider-Man Noir character in ‘Into the Spider-Verse’, and it was producer Amy Pascal who eventually brought him the live-action project after the two reconnected in 2023. The show will be released in two distinct formats, an authentic black-and-white version and a fully saturated color cut the production team calls “True-Hue Full Color.”
Cage described his approach to the character as an attempt to channel classic Hollywood icons like James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and Edward G. Robinson and collide their old-world energy with the Marvel universe to create something genuinely new. Now that audiences are days away from finally seeing his take on the web-slinging gumshoe, it raises the unavoidable question of what might have been. Would a Nicolas Cage version of the Green Goblin have been a masterpiece, or a deliriously unhinged spectacle, and which version would you have preferred to see?
