‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ Actor Jacob Batalon Reveals Differences in Filming Blockbuster Movies and New SyFy Series ‘Reginald the Vampire’

Spider-Man franchise actor Jacob Batalon — most recently seen as his character Ned Leeds in Spider-Man: No Way Home — has a brand new SyFy series, which he says was very different to film from the blockbuster films he’s used to. Batalon stars as the titular character in Reginald the Vampire, a highly intelligent slushie store employee with a somewhat aimless direction in life. One night, his whole life changes when he, for lack of a better term, loses it. Reginald is turned into a vampire, leaving him to figure out how to exist simultaneously in two worlds: the one he’s known, and the one he’s now stuck with.

This is Batalon’s first-ever main cast role on a TV series, and he says it was quite different from filming a big-budget flick like . “With movies, it’s very time-consuming in that you don’t get a lot done. I think that you take a lot of time setting up camera angles and setting up the sets and all these things,” the actor told PopCulture.com during a roundtable with multiple entertainment news outlets. “But with TV things, move incredibly fast. I’m talking 12 pages of dialogue every single day.”

He then joked, “Reginald, I mean, God bless him. He talks so much, literally, so much. I have nightmares of all the monologues that I’ve ever said in that show, and it’s haunting, But it’s a lot. It moves a lot faster, and you have to be a lot more prepared. I think you have time on movies to really get your things together, but because everything on TV’s a tight turnaround, you’re like, ‘Damn.’ You only have a solid three or four takes on each sort of coverage. So you really got to get your stuff together, for sure.”

We also asked Batalon about the core idea behind Reginald, and the show, which is summed up in a line where the character says “I’m a vampire, not an a—hole.” Explaining the message, Batalon said, “It’s basically saying it’s really not on the outside, it’s what on the inside. And I think that’s a very important thing, and I’m really glad you picked up on that. I think our whole show’s just a whole metaphor for loving yourself and understanding that you don’t need to be a Hollywood hero in order to be the hero of your own story. You can be whoever you want to be and however you want to be and still win at life, and don’t let society tell you otherwise.” Reginald the Vampire airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on SYFY.