Issa Rae joins cast of Spider-Verse sequel
She’s an actor, writer, producer, director, and Issa Rae can now add superhero to her resume, too, for she is set to enter the Spider-Verse!
The Insecure star has joined the voice cast of the sequel to the 2018 Oscar-winning animated feature Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse as Jessica Drew, better known as Spider-Woman, according to Variety.
She joins returning voice actors Shameik Moore (as main hero Miles Morales) and Hailee Steinfeld (as Gwen Stacy aka Spider-Gwen).
Meanwhile, Rae has not been shy about her love of all things Spidey. “Since the third grade, I have loved Spider-Man, comic books, memorabilia, everything,” she had said earlier this year.
While the plot of the upcoming film is being kept under wraps, casting Rae as Drew does open up the possibility of exploring a region of the comics landscape that’s been virtually ignored in the feature and TV series adaptations of the last 20 years, that is, Wundagore Mountain.
In the comics, the vaguely Eastern European location in the fictional country of Transia, is where Drew grew up as a child, while her parents used the rich veins of uranium found in Wundagore for their various scientific experiments.
The radiation, however, poisons Drew, which leads her parents to radically intervene to save her life by, among other things, injecting her with a serum made from arachnid blood. At one point, Drew becomes a Hydra agent, before eventually taking on the mantle of Spider-Woman.
But, whether any of these details from the comics will make it to the Spider-Verse sequel remains to be seen.
The sequel of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is scheduled to release in 2022.