It can be difficult for classic comic book characters to transition into the modern age. As exemplified in Insomniac’s Spider-Man games, J. Jonah Jameson has never had that problem.
Throughout Spider-Man and Miles Morales: Spider-Man, Jameson fulfills his bombastic purpose, becoming the Alex Jones-adjacent, AM radio blowhard he was always destined to become via his Just the Facts audio segments, serving as human shorthand for incorrect opinions. By the third game in the series, he’s returned to his home at the Daily Bugle, pompous and domineering as ever.
Jameson’s shouts – which retain surprising booming quality despite 60 years of cigar smoking – are provided by seasoned voice performer Darin De Paul. He’s been around for a while, with more than 150 IMDb credits spanning movies and TV going back to 1989. For context, his first role was in an episode of Miami Vice. He’s been at this for a minute. His particular bailiwick, however, is in the field of video game performance. The vast majority of his credits popped up in the last 10 years, with De Paul appearing in hits like Red Dead Redemption 2, Battlefront 2, and Middle Earth: Shadow of War. Oftentimes, he’s provided background voices – pedestrians, passers-by, bullet fodder, etc. He’s picked up some higher-profile parts in triple-A games in the last few years, though, playing General Phillips in 2021’s Back 4 Blood and Doctor Samuel Hayden in Bethesda’s desperately metal Doom reboot.
J. Jonah Jameson wasn’t De Paul’s first foray into A-list comic book characters – like any working actor with bills to pay, the prolific performer has diversified his superhero portfolio over the last decade or so. In Square Enix’s ill-fated 2020 Avengers adaptation, he voiced the Hulk and his future nightmare iteration, Maestro. He had roles in Marvel’s Midnight Suns playing Ghost Rider and Venom. Over on the DC side of the aisle, across a panoply of animated and live action projects, he’s played Lex Luthor, Brainiac, Sinestro, Mammoth, Trigon, Thomas Wayne, the manifestation of Sin, and Franklin Roosevelt. The guy has range.
With Jameson added to the list, De Paul joins a noble fraternity of actors dedicated to stopping that web-headed menace, Spider-Man. In recent days, the character has been played by Ed Asner in Spider-Man: The Animated Series, Keith Carradine in its follow-up, Spider-Man: The New Animated Series, and, in a performance so irreplaceable that nobody even bothered to try recasting him in live action for the next 20 years, by JK Simmons in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, then again in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
