In Spider-Man: No Way Home, Alfred Molina gets a helping tentacle (or four) to make Doc Ock youthfully menacing

Even though the news broke months ago, Sony hasn't officially admitted that Alfred Molina is reprising his role of Doc Ock in the upcoming Spider-Man: No Way Home.

SYFY WIRE has reached out for confirmation, but the studio's tight lips about Otto Octavius being in the Tom Holland-led film haven’t stopped Molina from talking — in a new interview with Variety, Molina confirmed he’s reprising his role as the tentacled villain, and also shared some tidbits about his upcoming MCU performance.

“It was wonderful,” Molina told Variety when asked about playing Doc Ock again. “It was very interesting going back after 17 years to play the same role, given that in the intervening years, I now have two chins, a wattle, crow’s feet and ... a slightly dodgy lower back.”

Time ages everyone, after all. But things will work a bit differently for Doc Ock in No Way Home. The first issue Molina’s character will overcome is the fact he died at the end of 2004’s Spider-Man 2, where he went down with his reactor when his work threatened to destroy New York City.

In a world with multiverses, however, does one ever truly die? No Way Home director Jon Watts doesn’t think so, and also told Molina that Doc Ock's story would pick up right after the final events of the 2004 movie.

When Molina expressed concern to Watts that even with the CGI wonders Marvel had done to Robert Downey Jr. and Samuel L. Jackson in Captain America: Civil War and Captain Marvel respectively, he didn’t think he could convincingly play the character with the same amount of physicality he gave when he was 17 years younger.  

Then he realized, however, that he had four helping hands, er tentacles. “I then remembered that it’s the tentacles that do all the work! My basic physical move as Doc Ock, as the actor, is just this,” he said as — according to Variety — he glared at the Zoom camera and made a menacing noise. “I just do that a lot, and the arms are doing all the killing and smashing and breaking. I’m just going...,” he glared again, “... with a kind of mean look on my face.”

Doc Ock fans will get to see a de-aged Molina go at it with Holland’s Peter Parker when Spider-Man: No Way Home premieres in theaters on Dec. 17, 2021.