David Dastmalchian Teases Who He Wants to Play in New Spawn Movie

Beloved character actor David Dastmalchian, who has played several comic book roles at this point as well as writing a number of comics himself, hopes he gets a shot at the upcoming Spawn movie. The actor, whose latest book is Knights vs. Samurai with Image Comics and Todd McFarlane Productions, told ComicBook that he would love to play a “lean and tall, a little bit geeky” character in the movie, which McFarlane has written. The plan is to produce the movie through Blumhouse, who had signaled a 2025 production target for Spawn. 

In all likelihood, the character Dastmalchian is talking about would be Maximilian “Twitch” Williams, one half of “Sam & Twitch,” a pair of detectives who first appeared in Spawn #1 and who have since gone on to lead plenty of their own stories, giving a Spawn Universe twist on the idea of how police deal with extranormal things like superheroes and demons.

“I’ve always said to Todd that there is this couple of guys that are hanging out that are in the Spawn Universe and one of ’em’s kind of lean and tall, a little bit geeky…I always felt like there was a space for me over there,” Dastmalchian told ComicBook. “I don’t like to put ideas in executives’ heads, but I’ll just throw it out there.”

McFarlane, for his part, shared the appeal of such a character, saying that he loves the visual of a tiny character facing off against much larger ones and having no fear.

After appearing in Spawn, Sam and Twitch had a number of their own comics, becoming fan-favorite characters. At one point, Kevin Smith was developing a Sam & Twitch TV series, but that fizzled around the time McFarlane started to get serious about bringing Spawn back to the big screen.

Warner Bros. released a Spawn movie in 1997, through its New Line Cinema imprint. The movie earned $88 million at the box office — about double its budget — but was not regarded especially well by critics or audiences. McFarlane started talking about another movie in very specific terms in around 2016, saying that he had an Oscar-winning actor interested (this later turned out to be Jamie Foxx, who remains attached to the project). The plan is for the movie to be a hard-R horror film, rather than playing in the superhero genre like the previous movie did.

Spawn is currently without a release date.