Green Goblin: How Dafoe’s Spider-Man Villain Became an Icon

Spider-Man and Green Goblin go back a long way. All the way back to the 1960s and the villains Silver Age origins. But in 2002, Willem Dafoe and Sam Raimi created a version of the character so iconic, that it’s not a stretch to call it definitive. But just how did the the Academy Award Nominated actor and a director with comedy horror roots make the Green Goblin so terrifying and, frankly, goofy? So let’s take a look at how heroes and villains work together on screen and how one of the best performances on superhero celluloid came to be. For Tobey Maguire’s first outing as Spider-Man, Sam Raimi and co needed a perfect thematic foil and found it in the post Y2K, post dot-com bubble tech infused counterpoint to a Peter Parker that’s more organic, with his naturally produced web, a departure from the mechanical web shooters Tom Holland has in Homecoming, Far From Home, No Way Home and the rest of the MCU and with Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man series.