“They didn’t want it to feel like a joke, a parody, or a meme,” says Yuri Lowenthal about Insomniac’s approach to the Symbiote.
Insomniac Games released the launch trailer for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 recently, showcasing new and returning villains and the effect of the Symbiote on Peter Parker. Though the available gameplay showcased some harrowing things with his psyche, hearing him lash out at his friends has only reinforced that he’s not okay.
For Marvel Comics fans, this is pretty accurate. However, for those who only know the Symbiote from the disastrous Spider-Man 3, which spawned the Bully Maguire memes, it may be a new feeling. Speaking to Collider, actor Yuri Lowenthal, who portrays Peter Parker, says he’s excited for fans to experience it.
“Knowing that I would get the Symbiote and would have to play a fundamentally different kind of Peter Parker for a while was also super exciting because actors love to play villains. But I wasn’t aware of how hard it would be to make Peter bad. Peter is your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, and making him sort of act in a way antithetical to who he is, putting people before him to becoming selfish, trying to take care of people to become violent, all of those things, and finding a way to make that…
“You know, in the past, sometimes if you slap the Symbiote on Peter and all of a sudden, he’s Bully Maguire, it can be comical at times, and that was something that they really wanted to take a great amount of care within this game. They didn’t want it to feel like a joke, a parody, or a meme.
“So, while I’m sure this game will spawn a million memes, they wanted to keep it grounded, and that all happened with the relationships and power dynamics and how things change from the last games, both the first game and the DLC and the Miles game that we’ve seen. So, I’m just excited for people to go on that journey with us because I was excited to get into it.”
Lowenthal is no stranger to playing darker characters – he’s voiced Uchiha Sasuke from Naruto for a long time. As for whether that same energy is channeled for Peter’s Symbiote voice, he replied, “Yeah, for sure. While I did not consciously go, ‘I gotta bring some Sasuke to this,’ some of the overlap is inevitable.
“And Sasuke is interesting because he was sort of the first character where I got to do that or where I had to dig into that area. Pre-Sasuke, I was bright-eyed and young, and I played bright-eyed young heroes, you know, naive, happy-go-lucky characters, and Sasuke was sort of like the first. But now I’ve played Sasuke for 18 years, and I’ve got a connection to that dark place in a way that I might not have really had before, and it definitely came in handy.
“But again, they wanted to make it very grounded and believable, and for Peter to have an arc. He doesn’t just flip a switch, and now he’s bad, he gets powers and has the responsibility start to get taken away, the responsibilities eroding, and we all know how important responsibility is to this franchise and Peter. So watching that and sort of tracking how that gets worse and worse and its effect on Peter was very important to Insomniac.”
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is out on October 20th for PS5, with pre-loading available now. While Peter’s journey with the Symbiote looks to be a core part of the game, Venom is also present and causing mayhem. Their identity remains to be revealed, but there are plenty of other threats, like Lizard and Kraven, for Peter and Miles to deal with.
