Marvel’s Spider-Man: Doc Ock Star Addresses Film Comparisons

Marvel’s Spider-Man featured an amazing Doctor Octopus performance and William Salyers wants to talk about it. On social media, the actor addressed fan comparisons to Alfred Molina’s iconic take on the villain in Spider-Man 2. Now, while Salyers is flattered by the praise, he wanted to make sure people really appreciated what Molina can do as a performer. Voice acting, motion capture, and feature film performing are very different animals. Each version of Doc Ock has made their mark on the character. (It’s not uncommon to see Spider-Man fans of all striped praising Salyers’ version when discussing the villain.) 

“Recently, I saw a post directly comparing my performance as Otto Octavius in Marvel’s Spider-Man for PS to Fred Molina’s performance in the Spider-Man movies. People expressed their preferences, as you would expect. FWIW, I came out pretty well,” The actor mused. “The truth, though, is that they were two fundamentally different jobs. A performance for traditional film, even with a lot of green screen and SFX, is very different from a mo-cap performance. And the script for a traditional feature film has to conform to a more rigid format.”

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 Salyers continued, “I met Fred. He’s an incredibly talented, extremely gracious man. I’ve seen him perform live, without benefit of million-dollar SFX. He was wonderful. I’m proud to share an epic role with him, and I can honestly say I have no sense of competition about it. Thank you for attending my Doc Talk.”

People Love Those Spider-Man Performances 

Marvel’s Spider-Man cast has had a lot to say recently with the second game right around the corner. ComicBook.com’s Phase Zero podcast spoke to Spidey himself, Yuri Lowenthal about playing the Wall Crawler and he says he could keep playing this role forever if they let him. For a lot of players, that sounds just fine. They’ve come to love the Insomniac versions of Peter Parker and Miles Morales. Lowenthal’s performance as Spider-Man also made that Doc Ock moment in the first game heart-wrenching as well.

“I’ll be honest, I’m just excited that at my age they still let me play Spider-Man, or that they ever let me play Spider-Man in the first place,” Lowenthal said. “I’ll do it to my dying breath if they’ll let me because I love it so much. I love working with [Insomniac] so much and I love what they do. And I just got to say, I love playing Spider-Man. It is the best. I’ll do it forever if they ask me to but I also understand if at some point they’re like, ‘You know what, we’re going to have to switch gears.’ And I’d be like, ‘You know what? I had a good run.’ Not everyone can say that they do what I get to do. Even if it ended today I’d be like, ‘I did that.’ But I also hope it goes on forever.”

Things Changed For Marvel’s Spider-Man

One of the big sources of chatter during the wait for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was how Peter Parker’s face changed in the games. Our panel at Phase Zero asked Yuri Lowenthal about the comments regarding the face editing and he’s pretty over that question. There was some fervor, but at some point the players have to move forward. They’ll get their chance when Spider-Man 2 hits PlayStation 5 soon. 

“The performance was the same for me. I got over it as soon as they said ‘Hey, we wanna make this change so that the facial animation is better.’ I said ‘I’m all in!’ I don’t care if he looks like a goblin, if my performance is better, than I’m in,” Lowenthal said. “I’m kind of tired of talking about it to be honest, because I think everything that needs to be said has been said. Some people will take longer to get over it, some people will never get over it.”

“The one positive thing I take away from this experience is that people connected emotionally so hard and so deeply in the first game that they’re mad when they feel that person changes,” he added. “I can only be so mad about that because it worked, not the change thing, but you connected with the character which is great. Now, get over it!”

Who is your favorite Doctor Octopus? Let us know down in the comments!