John Mulaney shared his unfiltered thoughts on the superhero genre in a Q&A video with GQ on Tuesday. The actor participated in the site’s “Actually Me” segment, answering questions that fans had posted all over the Internet in recent years – not necessarily expecting Mulaney himself to see them. He was pretty frank about his role as Spider-Ham in the Spider-Verse series, and he didn’t sound too enthusiastic about joining the DCU.
Near the end of the video, Mulaney found a question about Spider-Ham on Twitter, posted back in January of 2019. It showed an image of Spider-Ham eating a hot dog, asking: “If Spider-Ham was a spider bitten by a radio-active pig, is this really cannibalism?” Mulaney typed back: “No, but I don’t think anyone’s saying it is.” He then admitted: “Everything I know about Spider-Ham is the lines I say in the movie. I didn’t understand what it was when I arrived, and I don’t understand now.”
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Mulaney said part of that was the secrecy of the project during production. He said: “They wouldn’t even tell me what [the movie] was called. I showed up and it had, like, a code name. And they were dancing around that it was a Spider-Man-related movie. I was like, ‘I don’t give a s-.’ Like, ‘Don’t tell anyone’ – who am I going to tell?’”
That wasn’t Mulaney’s only dismissive comment about comic book adaptations. Earlier in the video, he found a post on Reddit proposing that either he or Pete Davidson should play Plastic Man in the live-action DC Universe. Mulaney said: “I know who Pete and I are, but I don’t know what the rest of that means. Is Plastic Man a DC Comic?”
As for taking the hypothetical role, Mulaney said bluntly: “It’d be a money thing. Honestly, I can answer for Pete as well – it’d be a money thing. Apparently, these movies pay a lot, these action hero things. But that is also changing in today’s ever-evolving media landscape.”
Spider-Ham fans don’t need to be too disappointed by Mulaney’s disinterest, since he is still expected to make an appearance in Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse. Spider-Ham only had a non-speaking cameo in Across the Spider-Verse, but last year co-director Joaquim Dos Santos told Collider: “you’ll see more of them in the next one.”
Beyond the Spider-Verse was interrupted by the Hollywood labor strikes last summer, but resumed production at the end of the year. So far, there is no release date in place for the movie, which is expected to conclude the Spider-Verse trilogy. At the time of this writing, there are no known plans to adapt Plastic Man for live-action.
