Tons of Spider-Man fans were excited about the new Spider-Man show “Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” on Disney+, but got concerned because of comments made by Hudson Thames, the new voice actor for Peter Parker.
During an interview with Mike Thomas, the senior editor of Collider, published on the 28 of January, Hudson Thames said he feared the series would be “too woke,” making fans angry. Hudson Thames is a 30-year-old American actor and musician. The last show he was a part of was “Marvel’s What If?, an animated Marvel series, and the CBS tv show “Ghosts,” which is an American version of a popular British sitcom.
In the Collider interview, Thames said, “I thought it was awesome. I mean, my biggest fear was that it was gonna be annoying and woke, and it wasn’t.”
Annoying? Woke? What? After this interview many Spider-man fans got upset, but rather than not watching the series they’ve been waiting for, they felt that not supporting Thames would be a better way to show their anger. After the interview, fans ended up unfollowing Thames on social media.
Ava, a Flushing High School sophomore who is a Spider-man fan said, “Spider-Man is special to me since anyone can be Spider-man… anybody can make a change for the better.”
The appeal of Spider-Man has always been that any one of us, kids from Queens, can do great things. We’ve seen this idea multiple times in the different versions of Spider-Man from Tom Holland to the animated version of Miles Morales. How can the idea of wanting to be a hero, of wanting to do good, be seen as a “woke” idea. Many Spider-Man fans feel what Hudson Thames said goes against everything the Spider-man brand stands for.
What this incident has shown us is that sometimes, we don’t know what actors or voice actors think. We see them as these characters, or these voices that they play. It’s only when we actually see them in real life go against everything you see from their characters that makes us realize that they’re real people. They are getting paid for acting, not their opinions, and what we see from the character isn’t going to necessarily be what the actor feels.
So what do you think, should Hudson Thames be voice acting for Spiderman or does it feel like it goes against everything Spiderman stands for?
