For Teifion Sussex, playing Spider-Man was the kind of thing he had been practising for since he was a kid.
Using YouTube tutorials at his Somerset home, he spent years learning parkour and martial arts moves in the hope he might one day be called into action.
Now, in 2026, the 36-year-old appears in Spider-Man: Brand New Day as the VFX, motion-captured double for the superhero.
He said he grew up “driving my parents nuts with my energy”, constantly “throwing myself over furniture and jumping on things”.
Sussex, who now lives near Shepton Mallet, said he spent his childhood pulling Spider-Man poses and pretending to shoot webs. Being able to portray the character now is “the best feeling ever”.
He said that upbringing helped lead him into work as a voice actor and physical performer.
While Tom Holland filmed scenes for the latest Spider-Man movie around the UK, including at Dorchester Prison in Dorset, Sussex was working on a sound stage known as The Volume, performing in front of hundreds of cameras.
“Everything was always under a code name,” he said.
“You don’t really 100% know you’re working on something until you’re actually there doing it.”
Sussex said he did not realise at first that he was performing for Spider-Man until he looked up at a screen capturing his movements.
“Every single little tiny movement you do gets picked up and it gets transferred directly into the character on screen,” he said.
“It shows a pre-rendered live capture … and when I looked up at the screen, and I saw Spider-Man looking back at me – it was like a mirror.
“That was when I realised this is real – this is really happening.
“I was realising this was the real deal. It wasn’t a spinoff, it wasn’t a fan project or a promotional thing – It was the movie and they needed my help to bring his action to life with my skills and performance.
“That’s indescribable really.”
He added that every day since finding out about the role, he had “woken up and it’s felt like an actual dream”.
Motion capture, or MoCap, involves an actor wearing a special suit covered in dots or balls to act out scenes that can then be overlaid onto an animated or digitally generated character.
Oscar De Mello, who helps run The Shed in Bristol, which uses MoCap technology, said the work required a specific kind of performance, often with bigger and more exaggerated movements.
“It enables things that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Motion capture isn’t necessarily cheap, it’s probably got more affordable as the process has become more efficient but you still need to do it in a studio because you need controlled conditions,” he said.
“It is a tool that can be used in a number of different ways for different objectives, and it can enable you to create shots within a TV show or a film that would otherwise be impractical to try and get.”
For Sussex, that meant helping bring Spider-Man’s action scenes to life, including swinging through New York and battling the Incredible Hulk.
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