Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man's Hudson Thames recently clarified his controversial comments during his Collider interview. The musician and voice actor recently appeared in an interview with a TikTok influencer named Straw Hat Goofy. The interview slowly veered towards Thames' much-criticized comments that the actor made on the January 28, 2025 interview.
Straw Hat Goofy asked the Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man actor about his controversial comments. Hudson Thames had this to say regarding that:
"Something that I said was cherry-picked and used essentially with no context just to stir up some drama. We were talking about that period of time before the show came out, and I was noticing a lot of comments online that were people being nervous or expressing concern that the show was using the topic of diversity and equality in an inauthentic and disingenuous way. It made me defensive, and I wanted to defend our show a little bit."
Based on the actor's comments, it seems that the actor wanted to assure everyone that the makers behind Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man made sure to be authentic in representing different cultures and people. However, people who heard those comments decided to take it negatively.
Explaining Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man's Hudson Thames' recent comments:
Hudson Thames, the actor who provided his voice to Peter Parker in Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, sat down for an interview with Collider in January, just a few days before the animated Spider-Man show started streaming on Disney+. In that interview, the actor was asked about his thoughts on the series' fresh take on iconic Spider-Man characters. Thames' response raised a lot of eyebrows:
"I thought it was awesome. I mean, my biggest fear was that it was gonna be annoying and woke, and it wasn't, and I was like, 'Yes, this is great, it's so well written,' like it feels real. I'm the oldest of five boys, so I feel like I kind of know what's happening in their lives and in high school, and it felt like it was doing that justice."
The term "woke" in the modern context is used by a fringe section of society as a reference to that's opposed to seeing people and stories not adhering to the usual social standards. However, Hudson Thames' usage of that term seems ironic because the ten episodes of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man seem to tell a story of not just Peter Parker but also his friends of diverse backgrounds.
Thus, Thames' latest comments seem to suggest that the actor wants to distance himself from the fringe section and clarify that his comments were taken out of context. He said that his intention behind the comment from the January interview was to defend the show from accusations of inauthenticity. Acknowledging that using the word "woke" was inappropriate, he said:
"It was such a poor choice of words. My point was that our show doesn't have to do that. Jeff [Trammell] did such a brilliant job of writing what he knew. Equality and diversity was always baked into the story that he wrote, and nothing felt forced. So I was really just trying to compliment the grace in which that all plays out, and ironically, that's what attracted me to the show so much in the first place."
While it might be the case that Hudson Thames walked back on his initial comments to win fans back, it might also be possible that he is genuine. Also, it must be stated that everything can be taken out of context on the internet. Thus, someone should be careful when using some words on the internet.
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