“Yeah. The last time it happened to me, I was flying around the Golden Gate Bridge. It was awesome.”
Holland is at home in London, waiting out a government-mandated travel quarantine, so for now we’re talking over Zoom. It’s an unusual time for the actor, a rare pause. Since he landed the part six years ago, Holland has played Spider-Man in five movies, of which four have made more than a billion dollars each. In the past year or so he has starred in three films, taking on the offbeat dramatic roles of a priest-murdering orphan in The Devil All the Time and a heroin-addicted bank robber in Cherry, and finished shooting two more. Still somehow only 25, Holland has ascended to a tier of stardom few actors ever reach, and rarely so young. “There are very few actors working now who are versatile in the way that he is,” says Spider-Man producer and former Sony chairperson Amy Pascal. “And he’s the hardest-working person that I know.”
“Since I got cast as Spider-Man, I haven’t really taken a break,” Holland says. So he’s enjoying some state-enforced time to himself. “I find myself ringing my dad [Dominic, a comedian and author] for stuff that I should definitely know how to do,” he says. “ ‘Dad, how do I put the washing machine on?’ ” Last night a skylight broke in bad weather, flooding his kitchen. The outside world has a way of forcing itself back in.
The next few months promise to be hectic even by Holland’s standards. In December he’ll star in Spider-Man: No Way Home, a film that Holland himself has called “the most ambitious stand-alone superhero movie ever made.” Then there is February’s Uncharted, a slick, *Indiana Jones–*y adaptation of the best-selling PlayStation franchise. “This is that moment of, like, ‘Can Tom Holland stand up on his own and be a leading man?’ I know that makes me sound like a dick for saying that,” says Holland. “But for me it is, ‘Can I do it without the Lycra?’ ”
The stakes for No Way Home are even higher. For several movies, Marvel has been establishing Holland as the new center of Marvel’s world. “Tom is stepping into the role that Robert Downey once occupied for Marvel, which is the favorite character, and in a lot of ways the soul of the Marvel universe,” says Joe Russo, who, alongside his brother Anthony, has directed Holland in four movies, including Avengers: Endgame. What’s more, No Way Home will finally collide Marvel’s increasingly byzantine cinematic universe with Sony’s own equally convoluted Spider-Verse (currently comprising Tom Hardy’s Venom movies, plus the forthcoming Morbius and Kraven the Hunter), thereby planting the seed from which years of sequels and limited series and sundry other subscription-generating content will surely bloom.
Holland, however, is not signed up for any of that. No Way Home is, at the time of writing, the last film on his Spider-Man contract. As we’re talking, in early October, he says there are still a few shots to pick up, some additional dialogue to record, the small matter of a global press tour, and then… nothing. “It’s very strange,” Holland says. “The last six years of my life, I always had a job to go to.” After so long in the superhero business, Holland is readjusting to life without a mask on. “It’s kind of terrifying, but it’s also really exciting,” he says. You see, lately Holland has been thinking about dreams, and wondering if those he once had—the future he once saw for himself—are still his dreams after all.
