Tom Holland Honestly Has No Idea What the Next Spider-Man Movie Is About: EXCERPT
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Tom Holland appears on the March 2021 cover of Esquire magazine, where he talks about his upcoming role as an opioid addict in Cherry, then he plays Nathan Drake in the movie adaptation of the SONY Playstation games Uncharted, and finally, the as yet untitled sequel to Spider-Man: Far From Home.
Excerpts from Esquire: If by some chance you’ve avoided the box office for the past five years, let me be the first to tell you that Holland has dominated it, starring in two stand-alone Spider-Man films and making scene-stealing appearances in Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame (also about a war). He beat out more than a thousand competitors (including Timothée Chalamet, who has since become a good friend) for the role when he was just nineteen. Though Holland has been working in the UK since he was a child—a trained dancer, he starred in Billy Elliot in the West End at twelve—most audiences know him primarily as the very American Peter Parker. (Some may remember him as the older son in 2012’s The Impossible; Holland says he actually learned how to convulse on command, as in Cherry’s jail scene, from watching “the lovely Naomi Watts” on the set of that film.)
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Holland probably deserves a few hours off, as he has worked more than just about any other actor this past year. While many of his rich and famous peers have been happy to spend the pandemic curled up in their homes, annoying people on Instagram Live, Holland has been active for months now, returning to set as soon as Sony deemed it safe—and financially necessary—to do so. When the pandemic started, he locked down in his house in London with Harry and a couple friends. (“It was carnage,” he says of the beer-soaked weeks spent with nothing to do.) But by June, he was off to Berlin to finish shooting Uncharted, an adaptation of the popular video-game franchise costarring Mark Wahlberg.
A new year. A new adventure awaits. @UnchartedMovie pic.twitter.com/fjzwpePZBf
— Sony Pictures (@SonyPictures) January 2, 2021
“I was getting so beat,” he says of performing a myriad of stunts on set. “I was battered and bruised, and I had tendinitis in my hamstring. I will never do a sword-fight scene ever again.”
Despite this ordeal, he took only a three-day break after the shoot wrapped before flying to Atlanta to work on Spider-Man, which has presented its own set of challenges. “This entire week of shooting, I haven’t done a single shot right way up,” he says, absentmindedly biting his cuticles, which he does every so often. “I’ve been upside down all week.”
“I honestly have no idea what this film is about and I’m eight weeks into shooting it,” he says, only slightly kidding.
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This is a problem he’s created for himself. Holland has a reputation in the Marvel universe for divulging certain details about forthcoming films at inopportune moments. (In his defense, Mark Ruffalo is widely considered to be worse.) “I will always argue that I didn’t” spoil anything, he says, “and Marvel and Sony will always argue that I did.” Among his alleged transgressions: In 2018, he reportedly gave away the ending to Avengers: Infinity War to an L. A. theater full of fans about to watch it. More (somewhat inconclusive) evidence can be found in the YouTube video “tom holland spoiling stuff for 4 minutes straight,” which currently has more than twenty-four million views.
Given this at least partly earned reputation, the powers that be have limited the amount of information Holland receives about his story lines while he’s filming them. When he arrived on set in Atlanta, he got the first seventy pages of the script and a short outline for the conclusion of the film. But he’s working on a theory that the packet had some omissions, or perhaps even decoy information.
He’s at an age now when he’s likely to have more serious relationships, and he’s not quite sure how to go about sharing them with the 39 million people who follow him on Instagram. He’s worried that his army of followers could turn against someone he cares about. “If you were to break up with that person, people will have their own opinions as to why you broke up or whose fault it was. And me being a famous person and having people that love me around the world, if I were to break up with a poor girl, they might think it was her fault. And I wouldn’t want that pressure to be on someone because of me.”
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If he could quit Instagram and keep everything private, he would. “But I think Marvel and Sony would shit their pants if I said goodbye to all of my followers,” he says with another grin.
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