Alfred Molina has donned a ton of iconic roles spread across multiple different genres that perfectly display his versatility as an actor throughout his over four-decade-long and counting career. But his most commendable performance, besides that of Doc Ock in Spider-Man‘s saga, was his minor debut role as Satipo in Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark from 1981.
Even though his role was very minor with a brief screen time in the Indiana Jones movie, Molina still had to go through stuff that would be a nightmare for all the people terrified of spiders. This is because, while Tobey Maguire’s second film as the web-slinger didn’t really force him to do anything with spiders, it was actually Spielberg who made his scene an absolute nightmare to shoot.
Steven Spielberg Made Alfred Molina Shoot with Real Spiders!
Alfred Molina‘s debut role came from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and that very role required more than just mere acting from him. This is true when considering how the filmmaker had him shooting with a bunch of real tarantulas crawling all over him — something that could easily scare just anyone.
As fans must recall in the 1981 movie, the opening sequence includes Harrison Ford‘s Indiana Jones and Molina’s Satipo stepping into a booby-trapped temple in South America only to find themselves swarmed with those big giant spiders at one point in time.
Recalling in the behind-the-scenes documentary of the making of the movie how he had “no idea what [Spielberg] wanted” him to do since he had no prior experience in front of the camera, Molina shared how the scene with the tarantulas was shot on the very first day as his very first shot.
As the Not Without My Daughter star shared in the documentary (via Pajasek99 on YouTube):
This guy’s kind of putting these spiders on me, and these spiders are more scared than I am. And he’s kind of keeping up this running commentary about the spiders, ‘Of course, it’s very hard to train tarantulas, you know.’
But while that was scary in itself, making matters worse was none other than Steven Spielberg himself, who, after “a couple of dozens” of tarantulas were put on Molina, complained about how they looked “fake” because they weren’t moving.
This was followed by the spider wrangler explaining that they would have to “put a female in there, then they’ll fight” since all the tarantulas were male. And, unsurprisingly enough, Spielberg had them put a female tarantula in there, and soon enough, all the spiders were all over the Three Pines star.
As Molina recalled during the documentary:
He gets the female and puts them somewhere over here – I can’t remember where, and suddenly, it’s like all hell breaks loose. These spiders, they’re running and they’re dropping and they’re kind of fighting and they’re running over my face and up.
Needless to say, even though he did, Spielberg didn’t have to even tall Molina to look scared considering how he most certainly must have been scared to the core, because – who wouldn’t?!
This scene must have been a real nightmare to shoot because tarantulas are very, very dangerous creatures and could have ended up harming someone even after being trained because of the one female placed between them.
Just like how a similar incident took place with Sydney Sweeney while she was busy shooting Anyone but You.
But apart from that, Molina most certainly seems to have taken his revenge on those web slingers after working on Maguire’s movie on the web-slinger!
Alfred Molina Took His Revenge on Spiders in Spider-Man 2
While Spielberg’s Indiana Jones movie had all those spiders crawling all over him, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice actor seemingly took his revenge on them after he scored the role of Dr. Otto Octavius (aka Doc Ock) in Tobey Maguire‘s Spider-Man 2.
As fans already know, Molina’s character ends up turning evil from being a kind scientific mentor to Peter Parker after an experiment goes wrong and ends up killing his wife all the while infusing the mechanical limbs into his spine.
What follows in the movie includes Molina’s Doc Ock unmercifully raining blows on Maguire’s web-slinger with the help of his newly acquired four mechanical tentacles in an attempt to punish humanity for taking his wife away from him.
So, even though he didn’t directly punish those spiders, Alfred Molina more or less did end up taking his revenge on them through the person they bit in the second installment of Sam Raimi‘s masterpiece series.
You can stream Raiders of the Lost Ark and Spider-Man 2 on Prime Video.
