Daniel Kaluuya's Character Was Almost Cut from 'Across the Spider-Verse'

Daniel Kaluuya almost didn’t make the cut for Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse.

In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, the film’s producers Phil Lord, Chris Miller, and co-director Kemp Powers discussed their decision to cast the 34-year-old actor in the movie and revealed why his character Spider-Punk was almost cut from the film.

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“Some people were like, ‘Is there a way to simplify this? There’s so many characters. Do we really need Spider-Punk?’” Chris said. “But once we got to know Daniel, we rewrote the part so it became more necessary.”

“He was in and out of the picture for a little while,” Phil noted. “We weren’t sure which elements we were going to stick in this part and which were going to migrate to the next movie.”

But Phil added that after meeting Daniel, the team “realized that he had to be Hobie Brown, no matter the cost. And Hobie had to be in the movie because that personality needed to be part of the story.”

Kemp went on to say that the actor was actually used as a reference point when creating early mock-ups of the character, so once he was officially cast in the role, adjusting the animation to fit his voice was fairly straightforward.

“As we were doing visual development on the character, we were actually using audio clips of interviews with Daniel Kaluuya,” Kemp said. “Daniel Kaluuya’s natural speaking voice was right in the pocket of that effortless cool we envisioned the Hobie character having from the beginning.”

Daniel is currently attached to star as an iconic children’s character in a new movie. Check it out.