Why Marvel owes it all to this Once Upon A Time In Hollywood star
He was the man who brought Spider-Man to life on the small screen. Now actor Nicholas Hammond is rubbing shoulders with Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Quentin Tarantino on the set of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.
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Marvel might own the movie world with its superheroes but you could say it has Nicholas Hammond to thank for its success.
“I started it all, I created the role of Peter Parker,” laughs Hammond, who was the star of the live action TV series The Amazing Spider-Man in the late 1970s.
Hammond, who is best known as Freidrich Von Trapp from Sound Of Music, also has Spider-Man to thank for his most recent role in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.
For an actor who has been working since the early 1960s with an array of top directors and who was once described as one of the “seven most famous children in the world”, this was still a career highlight, a “big chunk towards my bucket list”.
“Every single actor kept looking at each other and saying: ‘This is the coolest thing we’ve done in our life’,” he says.
His Once Upon A Time role as studio boss Sam Wanamaker came thanks to his Spider-Man days.
“I got a message that Quentin Tarantino would like to meet me, that he was a Spider-Man fan and wanted to talk about playing Peter Parker,” Hammond says.
“We had a general chat, a nerdy conversation about Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s.”
On the way back to the airport he told his agent “I don’t know what just happened” and was told he had been offered a part in the new Tarantino movie.
“It was the best audition ever because it was not an audition,” he says.
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That Spider-Man series was a big one for Marvel as it came after DC’s popular Batman and before the Hulk series.
“It was very low tech,” Hammond says. “Back in our day, if you wanted someone to go up the side of a building, he had to put a harness and a cable on and really climb the building! For what it was, it had a certain charm.”
He likes the more recent versions of Spider-Man but says Tom Holland’s webslinger “comes closest to my idea of Peter Parker”.
And of course without it, he might never have worked with Tarantino.
“Every actor who is in his films, whether it is me, Leonardo Di Caprio or an eight-year-old girl, everybody is very, very special,” he says. “He tells you, whoever is in the scene that we are filming, that person is the star of the movie.
“If you treat actors like that, they will kill for you!”
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is Tarantino’s ninth movie and is a look back at a golden era of movie-making, as well as the terrible night when the Manson Family attacked the house of director Roman Polanski and his wife Sharon Tate.
Hammond was there in the 1960s and 1970s.
“I think he got it exactly right,” he says. “Quentin is a serious, serious student of film and the film industry.
“I can remember making Sound Of Music in 1964 and then when I came back in 1971 — after finishing school — I could immediately see the change, there was an extremely different vibe in the air.”
Many of Hammond’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood scenes were with DiCaprio, who plays fading star Rick Dalton.
“I hadn’t realised how good he is, how serious an actor he is,” Hammond says.
In his role, Hammond was supposed to dominate DiCaprio’s character, which could have been awkward for such a major star.
“He didn’t want to be treated with kid gloves, he was really fun to work with,” Hammond says.
And Hammond’s famous role as a Von Trapp also helped.
“He asked if he could bring his mum onto the set to meet me because she loves Sound Of Music and loved me in the role — it was so sweet,” he says.
In some ways, everything always comes back to his part in Sound Of Music.
“It changed everybody’s life for ever,” he says. “None of us would go back to what we had been before that.”
He remembers appearing on the popular Terry Wogan chat show in the UK with the other young actors and being introduced as “the seven most famous children in the world”.
“We all looked at each other and said: ‘He’s talking about us?’ ” he recalls.
Hammond was just 13 and had no idea it would become one of the most-loved movies of all time — but he has no regrets.
“It pigeonholes you in a certain way,” he says. “If I’m approached, that’s what they want to talk about. But how many jobs can you say 50, 55 years later people are still coming up to you to say it was a joy, a comfort and a support in dark times in their own life and has ben such a huge pleasure in their lives.
“And how many jobs are still paying you 55 years later!”
He also reveals that Julie Andrews has a wicked sense of humour.
“She can be Mary Poppins but she can also be — I would never use the word ‘crude’ in the same sentence as Julie Andrews because she is so fine and beautiful — but she can be naughty and she doesn’t mind a good joke,” he says.
He is also an admirer of the real Von Trapp family, whose defiance of the Nazis was even more powerful than in the movie.
“They had been quite famous as singers of classic German music and one of their biggest fans was Adolf Hitler,” he says. “They received an invitation to perform at Hitler’s birthday party and Maria Von Trapp said this is the moment. If we go along we are in that tent for ever. if we refuse, we are dead, so we have got to get out.
“They left with $10 and arrived in Australia with nine children (Maria had another two with Georg by then) and another on the way. They were a remarkable family.”
He says Julie Andrews is a reason the movie can never be remade.
“I think it would be a very brave person who tried to emulate Julie Andrews,” he says. “I feel sorry for that actress because they are not Julie Andrews. It would be a big mistake, frankly.”
And he is not a fan of the remake fad.
“I think 90 per cent of the time they are a mistake and only once in a blue moon do they work,” he says. “It is a lazy way to cash in on the original. It’s fine to do a sequel or a prequel but a remake is artistically dishonest.”
Hammond, who was born in America but now lives in Sydney and is married to fellow actor Robyn Nevin, is looking forward to the DVD version of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood as it includes more of his scenes with DiCaprio.
“A lot of those deleted scenes will help people to understand what goes on behind the scenes of real movies,” he says.
Once Upon A Time is out now on digital download, DVD, Blu-ray and from the Foxtel Box Office.
Originally published as Why Marvel owes it all to this Once Upon A Time In Hollywood star