‘You can’t treat it as though it’s Shakespeare’: Jared Harris explains why he signed up for one of the worst Marvel films of all time

Morbius is not just a bad movie, it’s the KING of bad movies. It’s one of Sony’s Spider-Man spinoff films that inexplicably do not feature Spider-Man, and they’re not known for their quality (See also: Madame Web).

Morbius is so bad it spawned not one but multiple memes, and people still joke to this day about the movie making “a morbillion dollars.”

So … why exactly is Jared Harris in it, you might ask? It makes sense for the other Jared, A-list actor and world’s worst Joker, Jared Leto, to be in a bad movie, but what on earth possessed Mad Men and Chernobyl star Harris? Well, the answer is simple: he needed the money. He explained as much to Britain’s i news this month, while promoting his new movie Reawakening.

“I have got a mortgage to pay, you know,” he explained. “Sometimes you say yes to things because you need to make money.” The newspaper asked him what working on Morbius was like, and noted that the actor paused to collect his thoughts.

“I have observed that those types of films do well if you have a sense of humor,” he said. “You can’t treat it as though it’s Shakespeare. So yeah, that movie could have done with a more mischievous sense of humor.”

A fair comment, but honestly, even a sense of humor couldn’t have saved Morbius. The film was doomed from the start. First of all, who even wants a Spider-Man film with no Spider-Man? And then you have the ridiculous script, the lackluster dialogue, and whatever the hell Matt Smith was doing. (To be fair, he at least looked like he was having fun, which absolutely no one else, including Harris, managed to portray.)

So there you go—that’s Harris’s explanation for appearing in one of modern cinema’s greatest disasters. To be fair, he’s far from the only actor out there who’s taken a role just for the money. There’s a famous anecdote about Michael Caine and the ill-fated Jaws: The Revenge. “I have never seen the film,” goes the quote attributed to him, “and by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house it built, and that is fantastic.”