Spider-man: Across the Universe star details 'emotional' and 'challenging' scene

Spider-man: Across the Universe star Luna Lauren Vélez has admitted to having some tough moments while working on Spider-man: Across the Universe.

The Marvel Studios movie, which is the follow-up to the 2018 animation sensation Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, is currently showing in cinemas and sees Vélez, 58, reprising her role as Rio Morales, mother to the superhero lead Miles Morales (played by Shameik Moore).

The film picks up in the aftermath of the first outing but this time the story features even more Spider-People and universes with various different animation styles to represent these different worlds as they collide.

Miles ends up teaming up with various versions of the Spider People across dimensions to take on the Spot, which is launching a multiverse attack.

Spider-man: Across the Universe has received a respectable 96 percent fresh rating from the critics and an audience score of 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

With the film riding high, Daily Express US got the lowdown from Vélez about shooting: “The most challenging scene for me was when she gives Miles her blessing to go ahead and do what he’s going to do - for many reasons.

“One is that I think Rio intuits there’s something much bigger going on with Miles. Her mother's intuition, her female intuition. It’s not just that he’s a teenager but somewhere she can’t imagine that it’s Spider-Man but she’s aware that there’s something bigger, larger at play here and giving him this blessing to go out in the world.

“That was very difficult for me emotionally and one of the reasons was she says, ‘Take care of this little boy.’ Right, who says that their child? There’s something so profound about this.

“Her knowing that he will understand when she says, ‘Take care of your inner child.’ It’s something you want to say to every young person and specifically young men of color.”

She said this moment was so tough as it tapped into being a person of color growing up in America today and how many weren’t “seen in the same way” and Vélez’s sentiment of: “I want to protect you but I can’t protect you all the time”.

The Ugly Betty and Dexter star said the scene was also calling on young people to protect themselves and their “innocence”.

“I think that’s a beautiful, beautiful thing for a mom to say to a child and it was very emotional for me,” Vélez added.

Reflecting on how voice acting compared to a live-action performance, Vélez said: “It’s so different. In live acting you use every single thing available to you. You use your face, your hands, you use your body, physicality, and everything to help the story and you can rely on all of those.

“With voice acting, the only thing you rely on is your voice and the ability to convey exactly what you mean to say through your voice, which sounds a lot easier than it is actually is.

“Of course, it’s wonderful to be able to show up in your pajamas if you want to and without having to worry about what you look like having to do the job.

“Then it becomes, are you saying what you mean to say? Are you conveying what you mean to say what you mean to convey? And that is actually much trickier.”

Vélez said there were some sessions which proved challenging, where she was struggling to get the tone needed if people “closed their eyes”.

Adding this was something she actually relished: “I love that, I love that challenge because it bleeds over into other styles of acting and being in front of the camera, you’re more aware of what you’re saying and how you’re saying it.”

Along with starring in Spider-man: Across the Universe, Vélez is also part of another blockbuster franchise again playing mother Breanna Diaz in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, which is set in the 1990s and features an alliance between the Maximals and the Autobots as they try to save Earth.

Vélez is also working on a film with her twin sister and fellow actress Lorraine Vélez called I’m Not Her.

She will next be appearing in the forthcoming season of American Rust opposite Jeff Daniels.

Spider-man: Across the Universe and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts are showing in movie theaters now