This is slightly related: I read a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” you did a couple years back, and the subject of praying mantises came up, and you said, “Don’t get me started on the praying mantis.” Why not? Those aliens in the horror movie “Quatermass and the Pit” looked like praying mantises and it flipped me out. I was very impressionable as a child, which brings me to another reason I’m glad that I managed to finally do a season of television: Even before I discovered James Dean and Brando, I was all about the Zenith television in my living room. I wanted to get inside that TV, because those little people in that TV were far more interesting than the people in my living room. At the earliest age, the TV was the savior of my childhood.
Why “savior?” I don’t want to go into too much detail, but it was not the calmest domestic environment. I could escape by watching shows, or I could go in the backyard. Amazing how much time I spent in the backyard without anybody checking on me. I started digging a hole. I thought I was going to dig my way to China, and I kept digging and digging and digging, and nobody found the hole, and I had a shovel and I kept digging, and I saw roots and weird bugs, and I kept digging and digging. I would cover the hole with a plank of plywood, and then someone uncovered it and said: “Do you see what Nicky’s doing? Oh, my god, look at the size of this hole!”
Did you get in trouble? Yes, I did get in trouble for the hole. I got in trouble for the hole, and I got into trouble for jumping off ramps on my Huffy bike, going higher and higher. Evel Knievel was big back then. I remember at one point I was going to put on a show for the neighborhood and I would jump over beer kegs. I don’t know how I had beer kegs. I’d go over one, two, three, four on my ramp. Then I decided I was going to build a hoop of fire. I was going to build this round thing out of cardboard and douse it with kerosene and light it on fire. That was when they took the bike away.
Was that hoop-of-fire thing real? These are all true stories.
Let me return to acting. In an interview you did a couple of years ago the subject of retirement came up, and you said that you felt like you had pushed screen performance as far as it could go. What were the boundaries? I don’t think it was so much that I pushed it to the limit. I think I couldn’t come up with any more ideas as to what to do with it. I felt like I had realized what I had wanted to achieve with film performance with things like “Vampire’s Kiss” and “Raising Arizona” and “Adaptation.” I kept pushing the envelope, and I felt that I had said what I wanted to say with cinema, landing on “Dream Scenario” [2023], which I’m very proud of, and thinking: “How am I going to stay interested? What’s going to challenge me?” So I thought, Let’s do something interesting on television. David Lynch had done “Twin Peaks.” He took the mass tool of television and introduced surrealism to millions of people, which is immense. Halston did it. He was a genius designer and decided he wanted to take the mass tool of J.C. Penney, but the snobs in New York pooped on his head and it didn’t pick up. I thought, Well, what can I do? With “Spider-Noir,” I’m hoping that I will have instilled an interest in younger generations to enjoy the black-and-white style.
There’s a movie you did that came out in 2025 called “Gunslingers.” It’s a western, and your character does a voice that I would describe as “modern blues man.” [Laughs]