Lukas Haas is surprising audiences with his villain role in the Prime Video series Spider-Noir. The actor and musician portrays Winston, who actually serves as the catalyst for the show’s plot—and although it doesn’t turn out well for him, it’s a chance for viewers to see Haas playing a villain. It’s one more aspect of a continually growing career.

In an interview with TVBrittanyF.com, Lukas spoke about the reaction he’s gotten to his Spider-Noir performance and his creative process in working on the Marvel series. Plus, he reflected on his love for music and the synergy between music and acting. And last but certainly not least, find out who he credits as his biggest influence.

Brittany Frederick: It’s been very fun to not only see you in a Marvel show, but also see you playing a villain. What’s the reaction that you’ve gotten to your Spider-Noir performance?

Lukas Haas: The main reaction I get is different variations of like, oh man, you died. [Laughs.] But in general, it’s been a great reaction. It’s such a fun show. And it develops so much from that; it’s got a great little arc. I really loved my role and had such a fun time with it. And I think it makes a nice impact. So I’m fine with with dying.

Did knowing that you only had a finite amount of time to make that impact change the way that you approached the character, in terms of creative process?

For sure. When it’s smaller like this, there’s a finite amount of material that you have to work with. So you’re trying to figure out how that fits in and how you can make an impact in that amount of time. Usually when it comes to a longer role, you change as a character. You start as one person and you end as another person. So a lot goes into understanding and figuring out that shift that you’re going to have, and where it comes from and the motivation of it all.

They’re both really interesting. I love changing up the kinds of roles that I do. That’s actually one of my favorite things about acting. I avoid playing the same character as much as I possibly can. It’s not always completely that easy—because you have to weigh what it is that comes across your desk, and sometimes those things are similar—but I always try to find a different angle.

Sometimes I’ll play a bad guy. And when I do, I kind of always have the hankering to play a good guy or some other type of thing after that. I like to mix it up, because that’s what makes it interesting and keeps you on your toes. And my favorite thing is when I surprise myself—because if I surprise myself and do something that I wouldn’t necessarily expect myself to be able to do, then I’m usually surprising other people too, and that’s always the best feeling. Once people see what you’ve done and they’re like, wow, I did not expect that… I always love that.

Along those lines, for people who’ve watched Spider-Noir and want to see something else different from you, what roles would you recommend? Any other projects or characters that you particularly love?

I have like eras of my career; I have the ’80s stuff and the ’90s stuff and the more current stuff. But one of those roles is a movie called Rambling Rose. It’s when I was younger, I’m really proud of that movie. It was with Robert Duvall and Diane Ladd and Laura Dern, and obviously Bobby and Diane both just recently passed. But it was one of those movies that helped shape me as an actor.

It was a coming-of-age thing, and it was one of the first times when I was a little bit older, in my teenage years, that I really was able to do something that I was incredibly proud of. So I’d say that’s one of them. There are several over the years that people haven’t necessarily seen that I’m proud of, but that would be probably the main one.

In addition to the wide range of your acting career, you’re also a musician, and still putting out new music. How do you find the balance between an acting career, and your music career?

I always made music for myself. I became obsessed with music at a young age… I started playing drums when I was eight, and piano when I was eleven, and guitar and all that. But the great thing about music is you can be creative with it… I can be in my trailer in between scenes and have a guitar if I want, or go back to the hotel and write a song. Or if I’m working really hard on a film, it’s always something so great to come back to, to come home to, and pour my creativity into. It’s a great outlet for that.

So what’s happened is I just loved it so much that I got into writing my own stuff. And so I’d just been doing that for years and years and years and years and not putting anything out. I just do it and then don’t really do anything with it. And then recently, I had this Christmas song and I’m like, why don’t I just put it out? I’ve been sitting on it for years. Why don’t I do something with it? It’s a fun Christmas song. So I just did.

And then that sort of opened the door for me to go, you know what? I may as well just start putting music out. I spend all this time doing it and I don’t really have a goal with it. I don’t really know where that goes… but at least I’m putting it out there.

Have you ever found any synergy between the two? A character or a project that’s inspired a song, or the other way around?

There’s a lot of synergy. In songwriting, you want to create juxtapositions. And with a character, you always want to have two sides to the character—or more than two sides, because people are not black and white. They have a bunch of different qualities, good ones and bad ones and everywhere in between. And that’s what songwriting is also; I think good songwriting tells a story.

With noir, if you go back and look at those old noir movies, they use their voice almost as a melody. It’s really a musical way that they use their voice with the lines. As I was watching those old films I was like, oh gosh, listen to the melodies in their voices, and so I used that for the character. And I’ve done that before—tried to add more melody into my lines than I might have just speaking to someone normally. I think that there’s a lot of crossover with creativity in general, but music and acting go hand in hand for sure.

I want to tackle different types of characters. I do the same thing with music. One of the reasons I haven’t put a lot of music out is because I’ve never found my lane in terms of genre—because I just don’t have one. I’ll be with a friend and he’s playing some old doo-wop music, and I’d like to try to do a song like that. Or I’ll be at the club and there’s some electronic song, and it’d be cool to try to do something like that.

Then I’ll spend months figuring out how the software works, and how those plug-ins work, and how to mix a song like that, and how are they arranged? I don’t always hit the mark, but you learn a lot. Blues is where I come from, rock and roll, Beatles, [the Rolling] Stones—so then I get back to that. And then I’m like you know what, I’m more folk. Every song is different.

As you said before, you’ve been doing this for your whole life, and you’re still finding new avenues to pursue. Who or what inspires you creatively? What’s been influential in your career?

I love my family. My parents were very instrumental in the whole way that I became an actor. They’re both artists; my dad is a painter and a sculptor, and my mom was an opera singer before I was born. When I was first born, she started to become a writer. The first thing that she ever wrote was this pilot for a TV show, and it got picked up, so she brought me when I was four years old to the live studio audience to watch the taping.

I saw the actors on stage and I felt the excitement. I didn’t even know what was going on, so I asked her. I’m like, what is that? What are they doing? And she looked at me very sweetly and was like, those are actors. They’re acting. She explained everything that was going on. And that was a really beautiful gift, because that was what lit me up and started me down this road.

I was so obsessed that I was in kindergarten at the time [and] I refused to go if I wasn’t dressed in some kind of costume… Every day I needed to be in a different outfit. And instead of making me feel weird about it, my mom and my dad helped me find my outfits and they supported it.

I was bugging them. I’m like I want to be an actor, and they’re like, you can do it when you’re older. You’re young right now and you’ve got plenty of time… They [slowed] me down and that gave me more respect for it and made me understand it in a different way.

Then a casting director came to my kindergarten and asked who was the best actor in all the school plays… Because I was so engaged in it, they said me, and my parents read the script and they thought it was a really, really beautiful script… It was a beautiful script called Testament—a very poignant story about a nuclear holocaust. And so they were like, this is actually really, really good. He wants to be an actor. Let him go on this audition. He probably won’t get it and we won’t have to hear about it. But I got that. And from that movie I got Witness, because the director [Lynne Littman] was going to direct Witness originally. She suggested me to [Witness director] Peter [Weir] and that’s how I got into that.

But the way that [my parents] guided me—they never pushed me. It was never something that I felt like I was supposed to do. It’s just something that I wanted. And they supported me, but were also really cautious and careful, and instilled in me that it was the art that was the most important thing. The creativity was what mattered. And that’s still how I look at it today.

Spider-Noir is now streaming on Prime Video. For more with Lukas Haas, follow him on Instagram and check out his music on Apple Music. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Advantage PR.

Article content is (c)2020-2026 Brittany Frederick and may not be excerpted or reproduced without express written permission by the author. Follow me on Twitter at @BFTVTwtr and on Instagram at @BFTVGram. For story pitches, contact me at tvbrittanyf@yahoo.com.