Li Jun Li didn’t plan to become Hollywood’s Depression-era darling—but she’s embraced the roll. In Prime Video’s Spider-Noir, set in the sultry crime world of 1930s New York City, the Chinese-American actress plays Cat Hardy, a nightclub singer and femme fatale who pulls private investigator Ben Reilly (Nicolas Cage) back into the superhero life he left behind.
When asked about appearing in Babylon, Sinners, and now Spider-Noir—all set in the same era—Li Jun Li leaned into the coincidence with humor.
“I always joke like, ‘My gosh, I think I’m the go-to girl for period pieces.’ It’s not intentional,” she told Deadline.
Li credited her theater training and personal affinity for the genre, stating, “I love it personally because I’ve always loved period projects. I don’t know if it’s theater training or if I just think there’s an elegance to it. It’s romantic, timeless and atmospheric.”
She also emphasized the craft discipline these roles demand. “There’s a certain discipline that comes with the requirement from an actor to be in these kinds of projects that I love. So, I think that each project sets up the other, whether it’s the research that I do, because I certainly have been pulling from Anna May Wong for Spider-Noir,” she said.
As Cat Hardy, Li performs “Dream a Little Dream of Me” in a show-stopping nightclub sequence. Her musical theater background—including a Broadway debut in South Pacific at Lincoln Center—proved essential, though the filming process was anything but easy.
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“I knew that this role required someone who could sing. As I mentioned before I started out in musical theater and I did Miss Saigon and I toured America, then I was lucky enough to make my Broadway debut at the Lincoln Center in South Pacific about four years after that.”
The technical demands were extreme:
“I’m literally on a little moving cart and I’m being pushed into the camera and I’m singing the song twice as fast so that they can slow down the frame. Kind of like a music video, which is hilarious because there’s a part of ‘Dream a Little Dream’ that was written specifically for the show and it was so fast that when I sang it, I felt like I was crazy.”
Li described working with Cage as a revelation at table read.
“When we started to hear all the words come off the page, then I thought I was just going to go in like a cool cat, no pun intended, then Nic was so dialed-in, and laser focused on his portrayal of the character. It forced me to instantly click into the moment. I think that’s when we just started. That was the birth of Ben and Cat’s banter.”
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The chemistry between Cat and Ben plays out like intellectual combat. “When they first meet each other, it was the first time they are meeting their match. Whether on an emotional IQ level or a sense of humor, they both have very similar wit and they’re both incredibly sharp. When they talk to each other they are playing speech chess with each other.”
Despite landing the femme fatale role she once said she wanted, Li Jun Li resists boxing herself into a single archetype.
“I never want to boil it down to one dream role. I know a few years ago during an interview, someone asked, ‘What do you want to do next?’ And I said, ‘I want to play a femme fatale.’ And that kind of just manifested here for this.”
Spider-Noir is now streaming on Prime Video in both color and black-and-white versions, with Li Jun Li’s Cat Hardy anchoring the show’s noir atmosphere through performance, costume, and sharp dialogue.
