Every good film noir villain needs a trustworthy henchmen with an overt lack of moral fortitude to carry out their dirty work. The Maltese Falcon’s Kasper Gutman has Wilmer Cook, Chinatown’s Noah Cross has the guy who slices up Jake Gittes’ nose like a Christmas ham, and Spider-Noir’s Silvermane has Winston.
The new Marvel series from Spider-Verse triumvirate Phil Lord, Chris Miller, and Amy Pascal certainly lives up to its name, unfolding in an alternate version of 1930s Manhattan bursting with femme fatales, political corruption, stark shadows, and a web-slinging private eye named Ben Reilly (Nicolas Cage).
Since losing the love of his life five years ago, Reilly has given up The Spider alter ego, preferring to find comfort at the bottom of every whiskey bottle he can find, while his investigations business goes down the tubes. His shot at redemption arrives when someone attempts to bump off the city’s most powerful crime figure, Finbar “Finn” Byrne, a.k.a. Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson).
Among the kingpin’s criminal entourage is hardened enforcer Winston, played by Lukas Haas (Inception, Babylon). “He’s basically Silvermane’s consigliere,” Haas recently told me over Zoom, using a term that should be recognizable to any Godfather fan out there. “He’s super-loyal, trying to protect his boss, and also trying to take initiative.”
Haas is no stranger to hardboiled filmmaking, having played a similar character in Rian Johnson’s noir-inspired directorial debut Brick. While he tried to make the role of Winston his own, there was just no getting away from the touchstones of the genre, particularly Golden Age Hollywood actors like James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, who rose to prominence in the 1930s and ‘40s by playing gangsters.
As such, Haas imbued Winston with a “flowery” cadence. “By flowery,” he explained, “I mean you go up and you go down. You have the accent, a kind of melody to the way you speak. I just watched the old movies and that sort of sing-songy, melodic way they spoke really lends itself to this style.”
The entire production leaned into the iconic film noir style, whose visual palette relies on “heavy angles, long shadows, severe contrast between the dark and light,” the actor said. “We were playing into all of that stuff, and it’s incredibly accurate. They got this real filmy look with those digital cameras. You would do a scene, walk back to the monitor to check it out, and it looked like you were back in the ’30s.”
Period accurate costumes didn’t hurt either: “Those zoot suits with the pinstripes and everything lent itself to getting into the character and telling that story.”
Winston and Ben Reilly come face-to-face when Silvermane hires the booze-swilling gumshoe to find out who made an attempt on his life. This doesn’t sit too well with the crime-lord’s underling who hopes to prove his ability to handle problems without requiring outside assistance. In real life, however, Haas had no problems going toe-to-toe with his scene partner.
“Nic has a laser focus on what he’s doing,” he revealed. “To the point where if I flubbed a line here or there, he would—in a very a friendly way—tell me my line. Normally, if you’re just blanking, you call for the script supervisor to give you the line, but in this case, he was so on it. That just goes to show how well prepared, he is.”
With the endless debate swirling around alleged superhero fatigue (or “superhero lag,” as Haas calls it), Spider-Noir represents an odd, yet welcome, detour from the usual comic book fare. “It feels like something totally new [and] so authentic,” the actor agreed. “I got kind of tired of the quick [cuts where] you almost can’t follow what’s going on. A lot of those movies seem to be just a bunch of special effects, and the story isn’t really that substantial. But in this case, it’s really grounded in the story and the special effects are awesome.”
Amazon gave audiences the power of choice by releasing all eight episodes May 27 in the traditional black and white, as well as in full-color (referred to as “True Hue” by the streamer). The latter came as a pleasant surprise to Haas at the world premiere, which screened the first two episodes in the respective formats.
“I was really impressed with the color,” concluded the actor, who only ever saw black and white playback footage on-set. “I was like, ‘Wow!’ Because it’s not like your regular color, it’s like almost like Technicolor. It just pops in a really beautiful way.”
All eight episodes of Spider-Noir are now streaming on Prime Video
