The earliest promotional and marketing materials for Spider-Man: No Way Home largely revolved around Tom Holland’s Peter Parker doing battle with Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus, to the extent that fans started to grow weary of seeing footage from the bridge scene long before the movie was released.
Part of the reason for that may have been down to the fact Molina was the first veteran from franchises past to confirm his involvement, coming right out in an interview earlier in the year and admitting that he was strapping the tentacles back on, much to the chagrin of Kevin Feige.
Speaking in an interview with Sony, the actor sought to break down the machinations of Otto Octavius’ multiversal comeback, explaining that it led to him revisiting his debut in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 for the first time in a long time.
“What I thought was so wonderful about [Spider-Man 2], the first time, was they gave Doc Ock this wonderful redemptive moment. And like all great villains, like a lot of villains in the Marvel universe, he’s become a villain kind of reluctantly — or almost by accident. I knew that when Jon [Watts] described what’s going to be Doc Ock’s first appearance in this film, he just knows it’s going to be a moment of jaw-dropping awe.
I wanted to make sure that I was in the right place in terms of the performance, so it was useful to go back and look at [Spider-Man 2]. But at the same time, it’s a different director, it’s a different movie, there’s a freshness to it, so I didn’t want to just come back and replicate what we’d done before. It was important to me to arrive as if this were the first time.”
Alongside Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin, Doc Ock gets the most screentime out of the five bad guys in No Way Home, and battles with Norman Osborn for the most interesting arc. Spider-Man 2 saw him deliver one of the superhero genre’s best-ever villainous performances, and it was great to see him back on our screens seventeen years later without having lost a step.
