“People want him to be Harry Osborn Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know,” muses Zendaya of Chalamet in the trio’s junket sit-down for AP. “He’d be a good Harry Osborn. He would be a good friend of Spider-Man or foe of Spider-Man.”
Of course, in the comics, Harry Osborn undoubtedly had a relationship with Peter that meets the definition of “frenemy” starting in his 1965 debut in The Amazing Spider-Man #31. Having first come into Peter’s life at Empire State University as an antagonist aligned with longtime bully Flash Thompson, Harry later became his best friend once he realized they have a lot in common when it comes to family issues and general alienation from the world. However, with Harry being the son of wealthy industrialist Norman Osborn, the friendship would create serious complications for Peter when, just eight issues later, he’d learn that his new best bud’s father is Spider-Man’s longtime rival, the Green Goblin. Yet, Harry’s life would also spiral into dark places, and was notably the focus of the Marvel title’s (in)famous 1971 Comics-Code-defying drug addiction storyline before ultimately marrying Liz Allan, with whom they would have a son, named Normie. However, the specter of the Goblin would end up defining his existence, leading to a heroically tragic 1993 issue death (albeit one that would eventually become retconned).
Fully aware of this aspect, Holland adds to the Harry conversation, stating, “I think it would be good to bring him in as a FOS [Friend of Spider-Man] and then he kind of becomes bad. And then he could be a villain. He’d be a good villain.” Zendaya responds, “Which is funny because he’s so nice.”
Consequently, Harry’s intrinsic connection to iconic A-list villain the Green Goblin—and his own footsteps-following stints—solidifies him as a crucial component to Peter’s personal life for any live-action adaptation. He was certainly a driving factor across director Sam Raimi’s 2002-2007 Spider-Man Trilogy, in which James Franco played a version of Harry who’s a close childhood friend of Tobey Maguire’s Peter, with whom he would briefly become a vengeful enemy after Norman’s Goblin-related death while battling Spidey. However, director Marc Webb’s 2014 sequel, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, put a slightly different spin on Harry, as played by Dane DeHaan, who was still the childhood friend of Andrew Garfield’s Peter, but had only just returned to New York, having spent several years away, thereby mitigating the more immediate closeness of the friendship (and explaining why he wasn’t in the previous movie). Thus, Harry’s (rushed) Goblin arc here required a storyline in which he is accidentally mutated into the villain via an Oscorp experiment gone awry.
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So, where would Harry fit into all of that? Well, Holland cheekily plays armchair screenwriter when he offers his own take, stating, “I think what we’re saying is he would start out as our gang member and then we would have to kick him out of the gang.” Batalon jumps in on the composing of this narrative, adding, “And then he would turn evil because we kicked him out the friend group,” to which Zendaya responds, “That’s adorable.”
Yet, in learning from the mistakes made by DeHaan’s widely-maligned version in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, one has to accept that Harry is too important of a character to be hastily jammed into a single-film-defining character arc, especially one that deigns to cover a backstory as deep as the Osborns and the Green Goblin legacy. Indeed, there’s potent material to be mined when it comes to Harry, which, akin to Raimi’s movies, could be spread across another trilogy; one that will hopefully stick the landing in a more organic manner. Thus, a scenario in which Oscar-nominated Timothée Chalamet plays Harry would clearly require a measured approach.
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