Madame Web, the latest offering from Sony’s Spider-Man universe that legally cannot contain Spider-Man, looks terrible. But Adam Scott is looking great.
Adam Scott is a man whose career as an actor is so haphazard that looking at his IMDB page is a constant surprise (Star Trek: First Contact? Boy Meets World? Torque?). His appeal is both immediately obvious — he was the main love interest in Parks and Rec, an extraordinarily popular sitcom that ran for six years — and perplexing — he is a white guy with brown hair amongst a sea of white men with brown hair in Hollywood that are nigh interchangeable. Although I can think of specific performances from him that I personally love, like his role as Mark Scout in the incredible Apple TV science fiction workplace drama Severance, he’s also remained a low key, understated star that feels like he’s still waiting for his breakout.
The fact that his presence in the otherwise mystifying trailer for Madame Web is the most interesting thing about the movie is also profoundly confusing, especially since he’s in the trailer for about .5 seconds and he’s brushing elbows with much bigger stars. But once you dig into what this movie is actually about, it all makes perfect sense.
As far as I can tell, Madame Web is about Dakota Johnson discovering she can see the future because her mom studied spiders in the rainforest before she died. As she’s being stalked and attacked by someone else who also can see the future (?), she’s joined by characters Anya Corazon, Mattie Franklin and Julia Carpenter. Marvel Comics fans will know that each of these women also become heroes with spider-related superpowers, and it was then that I also realized something very important: Adam Scott is playing Ben Parker, AKA Uncle Ben, AKA the man who introduced his nephew Peter to the idea of great power and great responsibility having a correlating relationship.
Is this movie just going to be about Dakota Johnson preventing someone from killing Ben Parker so that he can die at the correct time? Possibly. Sony’s Spider-Man-less Spider-Man universe has been uneven, to say the least. Venom wasn’t very good but was still surprisingly charming, while Morbius was so bad that people turned liking the movie into a meme so pervasive that Sony brought the movie back to theaters only for it to tank for a second time. I hope Madame Web is more like Venom than Morbius, if only because my desire to see a wet, bearded Adam Scott on the big screen is all consuming.
Maddy Myers, my good friend and news editor at Polygon, said that to her, Adam Scott has the same appeal as the nerd in a romantic comedy that people realize is a knockout once they take off their glasses. In so many ways he is just average — another white guy who can’t quite escape from recurring roles into genuine stardom — but taking a closer look you’ll see his wry smile, his dry sense of humor, his elfin cheekbones. Although he has been cast as a nerd multiple times — his role on Parks and Rec is a prime example — there’s a quiet confidence in the way he carries himself.
This expresses itself in acting moments in his bizarre oeuvre that, for lack of a better phrase, haunt me. In the first episode of Tell Me You Love Me, an HBO drama from 2007 that was controversial for having sex scenes so anatomically perfect that people thought they were unsimulated, Scott’s character convinces his wife to have sex at his parents house. As he undresses his wife, she starts trying to tell him how weird and exciting this scenario is. Inches from her face, he shakes his head, gives her a lopsided smile and whispers, “No talking.” I’m just going to think about that for the rest of my life now.
While Adam Scott’s Ben Parker may not be long for this world, those moments I saw of him in the trailer for Madame Web will live in my mind forever. I hope the movie is good, but in the more likely event that it’s bad, I hope Scott still finds a way to surprise me — or at least, to be so excruciatingly fine that I have to fan myself in the theater.
