‘Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man’ Lead Voice Actor Backpedals Previous Fear That Marvel Series Would Be “Woke”, Says He Made “A Poor Of Choice Of Words”
In the latest round of ‘genuine clarification or corporate mandated mea culpa’, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man lead voice actor Hudson Thames says that not only did he make a mistake in identifying the Marvel Studios-produced, Disney plus-hosted animated series’ potential “woke”-ness as one of his main pre-production fears, but that his words were subsequently misconstrued by the public.
As previously reported, the latest man to bring Peter Parker to life admitted during a January 28th interview with Collider‘s Mike Thomas that he thought the chance to produce a supposedly ‘fresh take’ on the wall-crawler “was awesome”, particularly as his biggest fear was that it was gonna be annoying and woke”.
“And it wasn’t, and I was like, ‘Yes, this is great, it’s so well written,’ like it feels real,” he added. “I’m the oldest of five boys, so I feel like I kind of know what’s happening in their lives and in high school, and it felt like it was doing that justice.”
However, in the roughly five-weeks since his initial comments went viral, its contents met with equal parts applause and disdain from the wider internet, it seems Thames has had a chance to reflect on his initial comments and now believes that he misspoke when using the term ‘woke’.
Pressed about the situation during a recent interview with noted content creator Juju ‘Strawhat Goofy’ Green, the voice actor asserted, “So, obviously, something that I said was cherry-picked and used essentially with no context just to kind of stir up some drama.”
“We were talking about that little period of time before the show came out, and I was noticing a lot of comments online that I was getting, that was either people being nervous or expressing concern that the show was using topics of diversity and equality in an inauthentic or disingenuous way,” he recalled. “It made me defensive, like I wanted to kind of defend our show a little bit. It was such a poor choice of words.”
Seeking to offer further clarity to his words, Thames then explained, “My point was that our show doesn’t have to do that, it doesn’t have to pull any tricks.”
“[Showrunner] Jeff [Trammell] did such a brilliant job, in my opinion, of writing what he knew,” said the voice actor. “Equality and diversity was just already baked into the story he wrote, and nothing felt forced, I suppose, so I was really just trying to compliment the grace in which that all plays out in the show, and ironically, it’s what attracted me to the show so much in the first place.”
Notably, Thames is not the first member of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man‘s cast and crew to describe his initial comment as a case of ‘misspeaking’.
Asked Thames’ comments during an AMA given to the /r/MarvelStudios Reddit community, the aformentioned Trammell would assert, “Ha, I love Hudson and didn’t focus too much on what he said.”
“I believe he simply misspoke, and I know that’s been weighing on him,” he added. “I think we made a fantastic show that is going to appeal to a wide audience and hopefully captures what I love about this Spider-Man: that he’s a guy who cares deeply about the people around him and always tries to do the right thing.”
Following the recent conclusion of its first season, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is currently gearing up for a second outing – itself set to feature the multiversal introduction of Spider-Gwen, because no one at the House of Mouse can allow Peter Parker to have anything just to himself anymore without shoehorning in a hopeful merchandising opportunity – sometime in the coming months.
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