Malik Elassal on the superhero movie that lit his acting fuse: “There’s something about the way I felt”
In May 2025, Malik Elassal was introduced to audiences as one of the stars of Adults, a hilarious Gen-Z comedy series that debuted to rave reviews and passionate internet fandom. Before the show, the Canadian funnyman built a fearless reputation in stand-up comedy and enjoyed several minor roles on TV shows like Resident Alien and Joe Pickett. However, Adults was undoubtedly his biggest break, and he may have owed it all to a certain childhood superhero.
When Far Out spoke to Elassal in an exclusive interview, he revealed that the first time he understood the people on the big screen were acting, and that this was something he wanted to do, was after watching a defining 2002 superhero blockbuster. When the young boy exited the cinema having witnessed Tobey Maguire web-slinging all over New York City in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, his mind was blown.
“Spider-Man is my guy,” Elassal smiled, before revealing that he was an avid comic book reader growing up. Unsurprisingly, he mostly gravitated to Spider-Man comics, and when the Raimi trilogy was released, the films spoke to him on a deep level. While he may quibble that it was a simple case of watching one film, which immediately charted a course for his entire life, he does believe “there’s something about the way I felt watching those movies, for sure, that made me think of acting.”
Intriguingly, Elassal isn’t the first modern Hollywood star to indicate that a superhero film lit their acting fuse. For example, Timothée Chalamet and Jacob Elordi have both gone on record to say that Heath Ledger’s seismic portrayal of The Joker in The Dark Knight inspired them to give acting a try. Elassal wasn’t surprised by this, and he also wouldn’t subscribe entirely to the notion that superhero movies are ruining cinema. Having said that, he does believe that a diversity of filmmaking is still needed in a healthy cinematic landscape.
“I think these movies are, like, really important to people,” he noted with sincerity. “I mean, you obviously want to see smaller, more independent movies get made, and you want to see people’s new ideas still have space to catch a flame, yeah? But no, there’s something deeply important about these movies.”
Fittingly, as he is now making his way in Hollywood as an actor, Elassal has been upfront with how much he’d love to play Spider-Man someday. Amusingly, at 29, he has had to accept that he’s too old to play the classic teenage version of the character, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a convenient workaround just waiting to be exploited to his advantage – and it involves a character from the uber-successful Into the Spider-Verse animated blockbusters.
“It’d be dope to play Spider-Man,” Elassal told The Bare magazine. “To me, that’s the coolest thing you can do. I used to think about playing him all the time when I was 18, but that ship’s kind of sailed, but I’d love to play Peter B Parker.”
For those not in the know, Jake Johnson voiced this schlubby alternate universe version of Spider-Man in the movies, and Elassal would love to give him a shot in live-action. “He’s in his 30s, his back hurts, and his life didn’t go the way he planned,” he explained. “That’s a really interesting character.”
In truth, whether or not he ever gets to fulfil this dream is neither here nor there for a star whose future in Hollywood seems incredibly bright anyway. However, he contends that the emotional attachment to the characters and the stories you first saw as a child will always stay with you in a profound way. To some, this can be dismissed as pure nostalgia porn, but if you leave cynicism at the door, Elassal believes movies like Spider-Man “fan that specific part of you that thinks, in looking back, everything is positive, even the hard times.”
