Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Almost Included Another Netflix Marvel Character

Showrunner Jeff Trammell just shared the character that almost stood in as Peter Parker’s best friend in this reality.

January 28, 2025, 6:43pm

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is packed with Marvel characters, but it almost included even more. ComicBook got a chance to interview showrunner Jeff Trammell ahead of the series premiere, and we asked about some of the more surprising character choices in this version of the story. Trammell revealed that there was actually a completely different character considered for Nico’s place in the story: Jessica Jones. It’s a fun idea to imagine, and it’s clearly not the only twist on Marvel lore that Trammell and his team considered during this process. If the series continues, we may see more of Marvel’s best turning up in unexpected places.

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“What can I say? There was another character that we considered. I don’t know if I can say,” Trammell began carefully. “Well, I’ll say first that, yes, as we knew we were going to do something different. It was kind of like, for this story we want to tell, we need certain characters to fit these roles. And for me, I love Nico. I love Runaways. This is very much like an amalgamation of just characters I love that I would love to interact with Spider-Man.”

“So being able to pull [Nico] over, being able to pull Jeanne Foucault over, being able to bring Amadeous Cho — so many of these characters that have a rich history, but also, hopefully this opens them up for even more audiences to go become fans of those characters in the comics,” Trammell continued. “In terms of who Peter’s classmate was almost going to be, we had a lot of conversation about, de-aging, Jessica Jones and using her in that spot.”

This is a fun idea — especially for a show that draws so much from Marvel’s What If…? but it sounds like it was probably in a much earlier draft. A younger version of Jessica Jones might have some things in common with a dark and brooding Nico Minoru, but the ripple effects on the story would probably have been vast. On top of that, there would be the question of whether or not to re-cast Krysten Ritter, and it’s a sensitive time to use the Defenders characters for anything other than a live-action revival.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man premieres on Wednesday, January 29 on Disney+. Episodes will air in weekly batches, with the final two coming out on Tuesday, February 19th. What If…? is streaming there now.