Hollywood, if you’re listening: KJ Apa would like to play Spider-Man.

First, though, a clarification: Tom Holland, if you’re out there reading this, Apa thinks you’re doing great. But Spider-Man, that’s been his dream forever.

“He’s just the best superhero to me,” Apa tells me. “When I was a kid, I just loved him.”

He’d like to play Peter Parker; he suggests Lamar Johnson, with whom he filmed 2018’s The Hate U Give, as his counterpart, Miles Morales. A live-action Into The Spider-Verse would allow them to work together again. It’s an easy game of what-if to begin playing, a dream-casting exercise with few stakes. Somewhere in Hollywood, casting agents are probably trying to Tetris shooting schedules together for that very movie, but here in this conference room in Vancouver, Apa and I can just have fun asking, What if?

The 21-year-old actor knows a thing or two about comics already. Consider his credentials: For three seasons, he has played America’s most enduring redhead, Archie Andrews, on Riverdale, which is sexier, and more dangerous, than the comics you remember. So understandably, the CW show has asked Apa to be shirtless in more episodes than not; when it premiered in January 2017, Archie (a teenager) was hooking up with his teacher, while simultaneously trying to navigate the case of Betty v Veronica. If you thought your high school love life was dramatic, you never saw it play out on the CW.

Along the way, Apa has been tasked with a series of increasingly fantastical tasks: solve a classmate’s dead-end murder; jump through hoops for an FBI agent who later turned out to be a gangland capo; survive a juvenile detention center’s for-profit Fight Club; convince his girlfriend’s father to accept him. (When that father is played by a conniving and suave-as-hell Mark Consuelos, that’s harder than usual.) If there is a way to describe Riverdale, consider your standard teenage trials and tribulations, with the added layer of comic-book surreality. It’s as if the phrase “Why not?” served as the guiding compass for the writer’s room. A doomsday cult? Why not? A play-or-die board game influenced by a towering forest-dwelling gollum made of sticks called the Gargoyle King? Again, why not?

“I didn’t see this coming for Archie,” he tells me now, about... well, basically everything the show has thrown his way, which also includes a love triangle with that girl and the new girl in town, go out for the wrestling team, and sit through the SATs. “When I first auditioned, there was no way.”

That audition was three years ago. Now, Apa laughs and leans back in his chair. The room we’re in would be nondescript if not for the blue and yellow paint on the walls, and the giant Riverdale High School crest looming over us. Just outside the door is the cavernous set, a labyrinth of wooden backdrops, smoke machines, and rooms within the room: teenagers’s bedrooms, the sheriff’s office, a school hallway. Around us are reference points and moodboards for Archie’s world: lots of primary-bright blue; photos of the late Luke Perry, who played his father Fred; a grinning golden retriever known as Vegas. It’s a primer to the monolithic American teenager, which has been Archie’s greatest selling point since he was introduced on paper three quarters of a century ago: He is the Boy Next Door, trademarked and all rights reserved.

But for three seasons the biggest teen show on television has, in its own way, attempted to undo its own hero’s narrative. Crucially, Riverdale is not about Archie alone; it gives as much time to Cole Sprouse’s brooding gang leader Jughead Jones as it does his earnest best friend. Add in a few murders to solve, a thirst for justice and—this part is legit—his very own boxing ring, and suddenly you’re left wondering sure, what if the boy next door was equal parts Hardy Boy and Tyler Durden? Why not?