Natasha Ofili is a deaf Black actor who portrays Hailey Cooper in the Miles Morales and Spider-Man 2 video games from Insomniac Games. My talk with Natasha and ASL interpreter Gabriel is up at the NOC YouTube channel now.

Recently, Natasha collaborated with Coldplay on their video for “feelslikeimfallinginlove,” which incorporates sign language heavily into the visual concept. She also did the ASL alongside Mickey Guyton’s performance of “God Bless America” for the Women’s Singles final match at the recent U.S. Open. She also talks about developing personal film and writing projects which relate to a deaf person’s perspective.

Hailey is one of the first characters Miles runs into in the opening sequence of Spider-Man: Miles Morales, a game which enveloped us in New York’s streetlife splendor during the isolated winter of 2020, when the COVID pandemic was at its peak. In Spider-Man 2, the solo side mission “Graffiti Trouble” features Hailey as the playable character, which is a fairly unique experience in the video game field, given that she is deaf and communicates mainly through sign language, phone texts, and visual art. She doesn’t fight symbiotes or anything, but the audio and visual design is particularly immersive in this mission, and “Graffiti Trouble” ends up being one of the more emotional affecting sections of Spider-Man 2.

If you’re interested in another superhero-associated interview involving the experiences of deaf people and an ASL interpreter, feel free to watch my talk with Alaqua Cox, the lead actor of Marvel’s Echo, where among other things, she shows us how to sign “Daredevil.” Oh shoot, I meant to ask Natasha if the signing for Miles’s “venom” powers is different from Venom the symbiote monster. Oh well, I’m sure it’ll come up again in the natural course of things.