Teifion Sussex from Somerset has officially lived the dream. Not by swinging through Manhattan in red spandex, not by delivering quippy one-liners to supervillains, not by being the guy whose face sells merchandise. No—he achieved it by standing very still while Tom Holland did those things, occasionally falling off a building on cue.
This is where we are now. A man has called his stunt double work a childhood dream. Not his dream of being Spider-Man. His dream of being the guy who gets hit by a car so the actual Spider-Man doesn’t have to.
The press release practically vibrates with sincerity. Sussex has ‘always dreamed’ of this role. Somewhere between age seven and now, that dream narrowed considerably. It went from “I want to be Spider-Man” to “I want to be the person who falls down the stairs when Spider-Man falls down the stairs.” This is what we celebrate now. This is inspirational.
The beauty is that Sussex will never have to worry about being recognised at the supermarket. He’ll never sign autographs. His name will appear in credits so small that even the people watching will miss it. And yet here he is, calling it a dream realised, probably because someone told him that’s what you’re supposed to say when a camera is pointed at you.
The real childhood dream, of course, was always to be the star. But that job was taken. So Sussex took the next best thing: the ability to tell people at parties that he ‘worked on Spider-Man’, technically true, legally defensible, spiritually devastating.