Tom Holland on bringing Spider-Man home, buddy Jake Gyllenhaal and lifting his spoiler game
Tom Holland had to cross the Atlantic to make his debut as Spider-Man, but for the spoiler-free sequel, he’s brought the whole gigantic production to his own friendly neighbourhood.
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Screen Spider-Man Tom Holland appreciates the irony. His first stand-alone film as the super-powered webslinger after being introduced into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Captain America: Civil War was called Spider-Man: Homecoming.
But for the London-born former child actor it was anything but. He had to travel across the Atlantic to film his scenes on location in New York and at the enormous Marvel Studios base just out of Atlanta, Georgia. And he famously went undercover at the high-achieving Bronx High School of Science to experiences the oddities of the American education system that was so unfamiliar to his own prep school days in Wimbledon. He was — and still may well be — fresh-faced enough to get away with it.
But after appearing in two hugely successful Avengers films — the first of which turned him to ash, and the second of which brought him back from the dead — Holland finally gets to come back to the spotlight with Spider-man: Far From Home. The sequel follows Peter Parker/Spider-man on a school trip around Europe and was filmed in Venice, Prague and mostly based out of London, just up the motorway from his own back yard.
“It’s funny — the first film was called Spider-Man: Homecoming and I shot it 9000 miles away from home,” Holland says with a chuckle on the enormous set at Leavesden Studios, just north of London. “And this one’s called Spider-Man: Far From Home — and I live just down the M25. So it’s kind of a weird one. It’s amazing to be home. It’s lovely to bring such a huge franchise and such a fantastic workload to Britain and to work with a British crew is always lovely.”
And this time he had the upper hand over his mostly American cast mates including rising star Zendaya, who plays Spider-man/Peter Parker’s love interest MJ, and Hawaii-born Jacob Batalon, who returns as his best friend, Ned, and freely admits to struggling with the UK currency, tipping culture and why the locals called lunch dinner, and dinner tea.
“Obviously the class mates from the original movie are on a European holiday and being from Europe myself I have travelled there multiple times myself,” says Holland. “So I had already done the research, which is really nice.”
While filming at home has its advantages — Holland was able to show his cast mates around and organised for some of the crew to watch last year’s soccer World Cup at his house — there are drawbacks too. Such is Holland’s popularity now thanks to the profile given to him by the cultural juggernaut that is the MCU that the fan adoration can sometimes mess with shooting.
“That’s been one of the craziest things of shooting here in the UK,” says Marvel executive Eric Carrol, who has worked on both Spider-Man films for the studio. “Tom Holland has quite the fan base and on places where our filming permits have made their way on to the internet, I think on the first day we got up to about a thousand people trying to line the streets just to shout his name at him.”
While Spider-Man has catapulted Holland into superstardom, the 23-year-old actor has been in the public eye for more than a decade, since he made his debut in the title role of Billy Elliot on London’s West End. He parlayed those rave reviews onstage into a successful film career, making his impressive feature debut in the 2012 tsunami disaster film The Impossible, with Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts. He also appeared in Ron Howard’s 2015 whaling drama In the Heart Of the Sea opposite Chris “Thor” Hemsworth, who put in a good word for him to Marvel boss Kevin Feige when the studio was seeing thousands of actors from around the world to find the perfect Spider-Man.
It was literally a dream come true for Holland to play Spider-Man — he’d mentioned in an interview that he wanted the gig more than five years before he landed it — and he credits being an integral part of such a huge franchise as being a key to his own personal development. He’s since appeared in dramas including The Lost City Of Z and Edge Of Winter and will next team up with Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo to play a drug-addicted soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder in Cherry.
“When you send a 21-year-old on a press tour around the world to meet the world or do these amazing things you kind of grow with the process and learn about different cultures and parts of the world and that’s what Spider-Man does in every single story he tells,” says Holland. “So I feel like I have just been living as Peter Parker in my own way, just without the superhero side of things.”
He also says he’s become a lot better at keeping Marvel’s closely guarded secrets, after earning a reputation as spoiler in chief, thanks to some loose comments about plots in the past. Just this week he was under fire again after revealing the Endgame finale on the Graham Norton show, although, to be fair, the movie is now two months old, has made close to $4 billion at the box office and feeds directly into the events of Spider-Man: Far From Home. But on the London set, just meters away from avast recreation of the canals of Venice where he’s about to fight a giant water monster, he looks a little wild-eyed when quizzed about a new black Spider-Man stealth suit that he’s not sure is public knowledge yet.
“There is no new Spider-Man costume,” he says uneasily looking sideways at the army of publicists and studio execs surrounding him. “Oh you have SEEN it?,” he adds, exhaling. “You see I try to keep these secrets. I was like ‘what are you talking about? It’s great because I can go to the toilet. It has a zip. It’s really cool.
“You know that’s why all these people are staring at me right now. I know a lot about this movie obviously — I read the script and I know it from top to bottom but I have a handle on the old spoilers. I’m getting better at dodging questions.”
But he’s also a little cagey on the relationship between Spider-Man and newcomer Mysterio, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, an actor he has long admired and wanted to work with. The caped character with a bubble-headed helmet is traditionally a villain in the comic books but ostensibly a hero in Far From Home.
“It’s an interesting one,” he says, with a laugh. “I should probably read my talking points. They are like buds, you know? Jake Gyllenhaal and I are, like, now best friends. And Mysterio/Quentin Beck and Peter Parker all become good friends, so it’s an interesting team-up. It’s going to be one that takes fans for a bit of a ride. Because Mysterio is apparently the villain, but for us he’s our bud, and our team-up mate.”
Although he appeared in both Infinity War and Endgame, like most of his Avengers cast mates he felt like a small part of a giant puzzle and had no clue about what was going on for most of it. He was as surprised as anyone by all the deaths at the end of Infinity War — and was told that (SPOILER ALERT!) Tony Stark’s funeral scene at the end of Endgame was in fact a wedding scene.
“You have to keep yourself quite separate from the Avengers films because they are so huge,” he says. “I would just come in and film two days here and then go away for three months and then come back and film two days there. So it didn’t feel so much like making a movie.”
As such, he’s glad to be back front and centre on home turf with his Spider-Man buddies, who he says are friends for life.
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“It’s really nice to be playing a character that I have played before, with a crew I have worked with before, with (director) Jon Watts — I feel like we have picked up just where we left off and it feels like the perfect sequel to what I thought was such a great stand-alone origin story to Spider-Man and I am really excited to see Spider-Man explore Europe.”
Spider-Man: Far From Home opens tomorrow.
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