Spider-Man 2’s Yuri Lowenthal on Growing to Be a Great Peter Parker
By Justin Carter
Like all big superheroes, Spider-Man has been played and voiced by a variety of different people over the decades. There’s a certain art to the wallcrawler that a number of voice actors have managed to perfect in recent years, and among those is longtime performer Yuri Lowenthal. Known for a number of roles during the 2000s and 2010s—like Ben 10 and the Prince of Persia in Ubisoft’s Sands of Time trilogy—Lowenthal has voiced the hero starting with Insomniac Games’ Marvel’s Spider-Man.
This week’s Spider-Man 2 sees him voice the hero once again, and while talking to io9, Lowenthal was quite candid about getting to play a Spider-Man who’s been around the block, but still has room to grow as both a hero and a man. Unlike most Spider-Man media, Insomniac’s version of the character moves forward in his life, and Spider-Man 2 sees Peter truly coming into adulthood. Set two years after the first game, it finds him still dealing with the death of Aunt May and figuring out what it means to be a superhero in his mid-20s. Even when the game doesn’t explicitly call attention to it, players and longtime Spider-Man fans can feel the passage of time weigh on this Peter in a way they may not with other incarnations.
Lowenthal described playing this Peter as “a beast unto itself,” largely due to how Insomniac has worked to bind Peter’s superheroic life with his everyday normal life. And by skipping past the origin story to showing a more experienced Spider-Man, Insomniac has been allowed more narrative freedom they previously might not otherwise have. “You get all the stuff you love about this iconic character, and yet the story makes it different enough for you to perk up your ears,” he said of the games’ stories. “This story creates this Peter. By [Insomniac] starting Peter when they did, we still get all the Spider-Man stuff we love—he’s an older Spider-Man, but there’s still something new about it.”
