Created in 2011 by Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli, Miles Morales crossed over from a niche Ultimate Universe experiment into a cultural phenomenon once Sony Pictures Animation adapted him for the screen. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2019, and its follow-up, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, became Sony’s highest-grossing animated film with a worldwide haul of $690.5 million. A third chapter, Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, is now dated for June 2027, hailed as one of the most exciting releases of the year. Meanwhile, Marvel Studios has already dropped its own hint, casting Donald Glover as Miles’ uncle Aaron Davis in Spider-Man: Homecoming, a role that ends with a pointed reference to a “nephew” in the neighborhood.
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That Marvel Cinematic Universe tease has sat untouched for almost a decade, until Tom Holland recently said he wants to mentor a successor the way Robert Downey Jr. mentored him. Kevin Feige has been far less optimistic, saying at press events that a live-action Miles is harder to track due to the character belonging to Sony. The delay in introducing Miles to the MCU also complicates the most obvious actor option. Shameik Moore already voices the Earth-42 variant of Miles in the animated films and has frequently said he would like to play the character in live action. However, Moore is already in his 30s, which likely rules him out if Marvel wants Miles still in high school. That leaves a shorter list of younger performers whose age, range, and background make them worth watching once Sony and Marvel actually strike a deal.
5) Lonnie Chavis
Lonnie Chavis was born on November 23, 2007, which makes him the youngest name on this list, a major factor for a star willing to headline a Miles Morales trilogy without visibly aging past the character within a couple of films. Chavis built his reputation on NBC’s This Is Us, where he played the childhood version of Randall Pearson for six seasons and shared in the cast’s Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series.
Chavis moved into feature leads with 2020’s The Water Man, directed by David Oyelowo and co-starring Rosario Dawson, and followed it with The Boy Behind the Door, a tense thriller that requires him to carry most of the runtime with almost no dialogue. That combination of long-running television drama and a near-solo feature performance suggests an actor capable of handling both the ensemble demands of an MCU tentpole and the quieter, character-driven moments a Miles Morales story needs. His age also buys him the most runway of anyone on this list.
4) Jalyn Hall
Despite being a young actor, Jalyn Hall has already proven he can shoulder material with real historical and emotional weight. In fact, his performance as Emmett Till in the 2022 biographical drama Till earned him the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Breakthrough Performance in a Motion Picture, a result that required him to meet with Till’s surviving relatives before filming and carry a story built on grief and injustice.
Hall balances that dramatic register with a long-running role as Dillon James on The CW’s All American, a sports drama that has kept him in front of network audiences since 2018, along with supporting parts in Space Jam: A New Legacy and Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist alongside Kevin Hart and Taraji P. Henson. That range, moving between prestige drama and mainstream studio filmmaking, is close to what Marvel needs from whoever eventually plays Miles, since the role has to sell both the character’s inner struggles and the wisecracking energy that made him a breakout in animation.
3) Miles Brown
Miles Brown spent eight years as Jack Johnson on ABC’s Black-ish, appearing in 176 episodes between 2014 and 2022 and earning multiple NAACP Image Award nominations along with a win for Outstanding Performance by a Youth. Born December 28, 2004, Brown is of African American, Filipino, and Mexican descent, and while that mix is not identical to Miles Morales’ Afro-Puerto Rican and African American background in the comics, it places him in the same multicultural space the character was built to represent.
Brown’s background as a trained dancer, competing on Dancing with the Stars: Juniors and performing under the stage name Baby Boogaloo since childhood, also translates directly into the kind of physical control a live-action Spider-Man needs for wall-crawling and acrobatic fight choreography. He has already worked in animation as the voice of Young Ekko in Netflix’s Arcane, giving him at least some experience acting in a big IP production, even if it wasn’t Marvel’s.
2) Dallas Dupree Young
Dallas Dupree Young joined Netflix’s Cobra Kai in its fourth season as Kenny Payne, a role that pushed him through martial arts training so he could handle the show’s fight choreography, and he has cited Bruce Lee and Wesley Snipes as influences he studied to prepare. Before Cobra Kai, Young appeared in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, giving him blockbuster-scale production experience well before he turned 18, along with guest spots on Shameless, The Good Place, and 9-1-1 that show a working actor comfortable moving between genres.
In interviews, Young has also spoken about superhero movies and the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a specific interest, which makes him familiar with the universe and ready to be onboarded. Combined with the choreography experience Cobra Kai already gave him, that makes him one of the most prepared candidates on this list, since a Spider-Man production demands a willingness from its stars to dig deep into the Marvel canon to capture the nuances of the character.
1) Jaden Michael
Jaden Michael checks a box none of the other names on this list can claim. Born October 5, 2003, to a Dominican mother and an African American father, Michael has described his own heritage as Dominican, Black, and Caribbean, which lines up almost exactly with Miles Morales’ Afro-Puerto Rican and African American parentage in the comics. On top of that, Michael has already carried a leading role once, transforming his body to play Colin Kaepernick at multiple ages in Netflix’s Colin in Black & White, a performance that required physical preparation not unlike what a superhero role demands.
Michael followed that with the title role in Prime Video’s Harlan Coben’s Shelter, an action-adventure series built around a teenager uncovering a conspiracy. His earlier credits include Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down and Todd Haynes’ Wonderstruck. At 22, Michael is the oldest actor on this list, but he’s still closer to where Tom Holland was when Marvel cast him at 19 to play a teenage Peter Parker across a decade of films. If Marvel wants an actor who can visibly embody Miles Morales’ specific background rather than a general approximation of it, Michael’s own life story already matches the assignment.
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