If you keep up with every new superhero movie release, you know the reputation Sony’s offshoot Spider-Verse has built. From the “Morbius Morbin Time” wave to the moment people froze frames of Kraven to point out Ariana DeBose’s Calypso CGI face, the list of meme-ready moments keeps growing. At the top of the pile sits Madame Web, a film that might be remembered less for its plot and more for how quickly it became a punchline. Now one of its stars is finally weighing in on the wave of criticism from both fans and reviewers.
French actor Tahar Rahim, who played the Spider-Man-adjacent villain Ezekiel Sims, has seen the conversation from a distance and seems content to keep it that way. In a new interview with Variety, he admitted he has heard plenty about the reaction, even if he has avoided looking at it directly. He explained to the publication:
I’ve heard about all that. I didn’t look them up because I knew it wouldn’t be a good idea (…) Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I just did my job!
It is an honest and straightforward answer. At the end of the day an actor can only show up, hit their marks, and try to deliver something solid with the material they are given. Rahim has built a career on complex roles in films like A Prophet and The Mauritanian, but even the most talented performers can only do so much when the script in front of them leaves little room to breathe. The notoriously viral “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died” is the kind of line no actor can fully rescue.
Rahim’s response also highlights something audiences sometimes forget. Actors often work with limited context. They shoot scenes out of order. They rely on placeholder effects. They trust the larger machine to shape the final product. By the time the movie reaches theaters, any number of choices made long after production can change the tone or clarity of a performance. When a project misses the mark, the cast ends up fielding questions about choices they had little control over.
Madame Web faced an uphill climb from the start. It had no Spider-Man to anchor it, no clear sense of tone, and a script that felt stitched together from competing ideas. The film still made noise online, but mainly for the wrong reasons. As Rahim said, “sometimes it works,” and sometimes it doesn't–and in all fairness, nearly none of the Sony Spider-Man-less Spider-Verse movies have worked outside of the Venom trilogy.
The memes don’t seem to bother him. Rahim looks content to stay out of the commentary and let the movie stand on its own. It’s a healthy way to handle it. Not every project lands. Not every franchise expansion comes together. Sometimes the best you can do is move on and trust the next role to show what you can really do. And he is. Rahim’s already deep into his next project: a new book-to-screen adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, set to arrive in theaters just in time for Christmas on the 2026 movie schedule.
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