Brendan Gleeson says the best part of playing Silvermane in Spider-Noir was the fight in the dialogue. The actor described his scenes with Nicolas Cage as a kind of tennis match, one that made the crime-boss rivalry feel sharp, funny and dangerous at the same time.
Gleeson said, “The joust was always fun,” and added that Cage was “very generous, very easy, very inventive, fearless, all that stuff.” He said the back-and-forth let the two actors keep changing the rhythm of a scene, “almost come back with a different spin on it and give back as good as you can.”
That matters because all eight episodes of Spider-Noir are now available to stream on Prime Video, giving viewers the full run of a series that first debuted domestically on MGM+’s linear broadcast channel. The show is based on the Spider-Man Noir comic book series and stars Karen Rodriguez, Lamorne Morris, Abraham Popoola, Li Jun Li and Jack Huston alongside Cage and Gleeson.
Gleeson plays Silvermane, the sharp-tongued antagonist whose relationship with Ben Reilly is built on a steady mix of menace and grudging affection. He called Cage’s Ben Reilly “a bit of a chip off the old block” who “makes me laugh,” and said the pair were “sworn enemies” who sort of liked each other. At one point, Gleeson summed up the dynamic with a line that sounds like it could belong in the show itself: “Even if I had to kill you, I love you to bits.”
That chemistry is central to why Gleeson’s turn lands. He is once again playing the kind of commanding, menacing figure that can dominate a scene without raising his voice, and he said the character’s theatrical edge was part of the appeal: “Have a little stagger in your cane and you slice somebody’s throat,” he said. Silvermane is not just another villain in a comic-book adaptation; he is the engine of the rivalry, and Gleeson clearly enjoyed leaning into the joke and the threat at the same time.
With the season now fully out, the question for viewers is not whether Silvermane works in isolation. It is whether the show’s mix of noir style, comic-book source material and dueling performances gives Spider-Noir enough force to keep people watching all the way through. Based on Gleeson’s account of the set, the answer is that the spark was there from the start, and the collision between him and Cage was never a problem to solve — it was the point.
