Throughout the marketing campaign for Spider-Man: No Way Home, the returns and potential involvement of Rhys Ifans’ Lizard and Thomas Haden Church’s Sandman generated plenty of pertinent questions from fans.
The various trailers, TV spots and promo images featured Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus, Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin and Jamie Foxx’s Electro, but the other two of the movie’s multiversal antagonists were only seen in their CGI forms, leading people to ask whether Ifans and Church had even lent their vocal talents to No Way Home.
As it turned out, they had, but Sandman and Lizard spent 99% of their screentime entirely pixelated, which was admittedly a little jarring when the distinctly more humanoid Otto Octavius, Max Dillon and Normal Osborn were next to them in virtually every scene.
However, when we do finally get to see Ifans and Church, the footage wasn’t even filmed specifically for No Way Home. Instead, shots of the stars from The Amazing Spider-Man and Spider-Man 3 are composited into the finished film, which means that the returning pair didn’t even set foot on the set during production. It’s hardly a game-changing revelation, but it’s nonetheless a hugely fascinating insight into how the multiversal epic was put together.
