Oscar Isaac on wanting to drag Pedro Pascal into the Spider-Verse

In the character's history of swinging across our pages and screens, Spider-Man has always held some fairly consistent traits. He's just a kid who somehow ended up a superhero, he's got some pretty deep-rooted issues vis-à-vis a family member getting murdered and, despite it all, he's funny. Flinging self-deprecating quips like a web shooter is something that's created a throughline between the three live-action iterations by Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland, as well as the six Spider-Men (including one Spider-Pig, voiced by John Mulaney) we were introduced to in 2018's Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, which cracked the multiverse open into an awe-inspiring animated spectacle. Now, five years on, the long-awaited sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, is flying onto screens and introducing us to, conservatively, a thousand new Spider-Men. All of them are pretty funny, bar one – Miguel O'Hara, voiced by Oscar Isaac. O'Hara joins this film as the leader of a Spider Society tasked with making sure Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) stays in line so as to protect the multiverse. He, compared to his Spidery cohorts (which now includes characters voiced by Daniel Kaluuya, Andy Samberg, Issa Rae and Jake Johnson, returning as Peter B. Parker), is humourless, threatening and unsympathetic. His Spidey suit is decked out with claws and spikes, and he takes things Very Seriously. Basically, he's not the Spider-Man we know and love. “What's fun is being unique”, Isaac tells GQ about playing the grumpiest Spider-Man in the haystack. As the Spiderverse expands further than we've ever seen it before, Oscar Isaac chats with GQ about playing it straight, giving his children action figures of himself and roping Pedro Pascal into the multiverse. OI: No more ‘Interesting Person No.1’ role here. Did they change it now? Did they retcon it? I hope not on it. Well, "Interesting Person No.1' was fun, but man, Miguel O'Hara is pretty amazing as a character. You're not like other Spider-Men. Yeah, he's got this particular unique quality to him, but there are lots of things about him that I think are very surprising and make him such his own thing. The fangs and claws and this violence that's simmering underneath at all times? He's just a really interesting character. Are you sad you didn't get to flex more of your comedy muscles? I do think he gets to by the nature of him being the straight man, you know? So no, I wasn't disappointed at all. There was so much to do there, we laughed so much. Finding the humour with someone that just is so serious can be really fun. People joke that voice acting is an easier gig, that you can just turn up in your pyjamas and clock out. But what challenges are unique to voice acting that aren't there for live-action work? You only have your voice to be able to express a lot of what's going on. There's more collaboration involved because it's your voice, it's the animators, it's the design, it's all these things coming together to create the character. There's something beautifully communal about putting that together and just adding one element and then seeing it all come together. It's just such a beautiful work of art. The art in this thing is so incredible, but specifically with Miguel. The way that he transforms visually and becomes more feral as things fall apart, I just thought, was so, so amazing.