You may not have heard that in the new Sider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, there is a character played by Nicolas Cage. His name is Spider-Man Noir and he's a parody of a Carver-style 1930s private eye who, mixed with Spider-man: "sometimes I let matches burn down to my fingertips just to feel something, anything." Some of the people behind the movie (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, Chris Miller, and Phil Lord) were interviewed by Collider about casting Cage in the role and how, when they tried to get him to riff some 1930s-style slang, he came up with something that wasn't exactly appropriate for a movie geared toward children:
ROTHMAN: We loved working with him. And obviously, he had fun with it. You do tend to over-prepare for Nic Cage because it’s kind of like “What would be funny to make Nic Cage say?” You end up writing an extra 20 lines just to like hear him say it even though you know it’s not going to be for the movie. In the movie…what does he say? “Biscuit-boxer”?. We literally had him record like 50 different weird slangs. Like, “You turtle-slapper”.
RAMSEY: A lot of them would have gotten us an NC-17 rating.
ROTHMAN: We literally had him record something and then it was in the movie…And then someone bothered to google it and it turned out to be a filthy, pornographic act, and we had to spend a lot of money.
PERSICHETTI: It wasn’t from the 30s at all.What he said "wasn't from the 1930s at all."
Watch a clip of the character below and it will give a sense of just what kind of phrase he came up with:
