Alfred Molina on Playing an Octopus 5 Years After Doc Ock’s Last Appearance [Exclusive]

In 2019, Alfred Molina reprised his beloved role as Doctor Otto Octavius AKA Doc Ock in Spider-Man: No Way Home, almost twenty years after playing the iconic Marvel villain for the first time. Besides some rumors that he may return again in one of the forthcoming Avengers movies, Doc Ock’s future in the MCU looks particularly quiet, but Molina remains an in-demand actor. His new leading role comes in Netflix’s The Boroughs, a nostalgic sci-fi series in the vein of Stranger Things that sees him playing a retiree thrust into a high-stakes conspiracy with lives at stake. He’s excellent as Sam, a dramatically different role from his other recent 2026 performances in Remarkably Bright Creatures.

In Remarkably Bright Creatures, Molina appears alongside Lewis Pullman and Sally Field, as Marcellus, a giant octopus. The irony absolutely wasn’t lost on us, so during the press tour for The Boroughs, when Molina spoke exclusively to ComicBook, we asked him about the full-circle casting. His good-humored response: “When they offered me that part, I thought, ‘Is this some kind of sick joke?! I dunno… but it worked out great!”

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Unlike his performance as Doc Ock, in The Boroughs, Molina plays a retired engineer whose skills are key to overcoming the supernatural alongside a motley crew of fellow retirees. We also asked him about playing an engineer again after his role in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 and No Way Home. He revealed he doesn’t share a lot with those technically minded characters, no matter how well he does on screen:

“The great thing about playing these characters is you don’t have to have their knowledge. All you have to do is fake it enough that the audience suspend their disbelief. For instance, the scene in The Boroughs where I fix Geena’s car, I didn’t do anything. I just put a spanner against the piece of metal and I took the crowbar and stuck that in there too and I just prayed they were going to cut above my hands and everything would be fine… And it was the same thing with Doc Ock. All that crazy science stuff, all that pseudo-science – the inhibitor chip and all that, I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. The trick is to do it in an authentic way so the audience goes ‘yeah, okay, I’ll buy that.”

He’s very convincing in The Boroughs, just as he was as Doctor Octopus. He stars alongside Geena Davis, Denis O’Hare, Bill Pullman, Clarke Peters, and Jena Malone, as well as fellow MCU star Alfre Woodard, who appeared in Captain America: Civil War. She plays a former investigative journalist who is hit by the death of a loved one at the heart of The Boroughs’ plot. We also spoke to Woodard, whose Civil War character was driven by grief, who revealed that Judy’s “grief… spurs her on, because she is a justice seeker always. She wants people to get their comeuppance… She’s an emotional person and that’s what drives her.”

All 8 episodes of The Boroughs are streaming now on Netflix. What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!