How Tom Holland jumped from Spider-Man to Shakespeare
As the British heart-throb begins his run of Romeo and Juliet in the West End, we join his fans in the theatre and track his rise from ballet school to Marvel pin-up
“Thus with a kiss I die.” Or should that be a radioactive spider bite? Spider-Man swung his way into the West End this week as the teen heart-throb and Marvel superstar Tom Holland unveiled his Romeo in Jamie Lloyd’s new West End production of the star-crossed lovers’ story. And although he might have left his Spidey suit at home and stopped short of webbing his way up Juliet’s balcony, as a sweaty, grinning, muscled-up Holland made his bows at the end of Tuesday’s night preview, it was clear whom the whooping, whistling and strikingly teenage audience had come for. Don’t sweat it, Shakespeare – leave this one to Spider-Man.
There’s a long (and not entirely glorious) history of glitzy celebrities venturing into West End or Broadway theatres, bringing ready-built flocks of their fans in exchange for a magic dusting of theatrical prestige. Sometimes it works: in the past year the Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker’s Plaza Suite, the Pussycat Dolls pop star Nicole Scherzinger’s Sunset Boulevard (another Lloyd production) and the Succession villainess Sarah Snook’s Picture of Dorian Gray have charmed crowds and critics alike.
But Holland is something new, a teen idol (he may have reached the grand old age of 27, but his fans certainly haven’t) whose casting is a clear attempt to attract a much younger crowd. Through his relationship with his Spider-Man co-star Zendaya, Holland is one half of Gen Z’s favourite celebrity couple – between them the pair have about 250 million Instagram followers.
Will Holland loosen up (and pack out) the increasingly silver-haired West End? Can Spider-Man do Shakespeare?
The preshow buzz at a preview this week was promising: scrunchie-ponytailed teens flooded the auditorium, thrilled to have nabbed tickets. “I just have to see him,” said Zoe, a 20-year-old musical theatre student from Essex who’d spent two hours in a virtual queue for one of the golden handful of pounds 25 tickets (the official top price is pounds 275, but you can easily spend pounds 600 on the secondary market). “He’s a great actor, he’s good-looking, what more do you want?” said Migle, a 23-year-old Marvel fan from Lithuania who had been one of the first 1,000 in the virtual ticket queue. Asked if she also liked Shakespeare, she was confused. “Who?”
Fans had travelled from all over – from Belgium to Baltimore – to see their hero on stage. But serious feminists will be pleased to hear that quite a few seemed more interested in Holland’s girlfriend than his performance. “We’re really Zendaya fans. We love them as a couple,” said 28-year-old Katie, sipping a large glass of white on the theatre balcony with two friends. She’d spent four hours in the virtual queue and paid pounds 90 a ticket ("a lot for bad seats").
“We’re very tall and we love that Zendaya’s dating someone shorter than her [Zendaya is 5ft 10in while Holland is 5ft 8in]. I don’t think I’d have done that at 23,” said Lori, 39, from Maryland, who was there with her sister. They had paid pounds 165 each – “that includes champagne and ice cream” – and resold a spare ticket two days earlier for pounds 250. “I think I could have got more,” she said.
Lloyd is considered something of a theatrical rainmaker. The 44-year-old director’s hits include his 2019 Broadway revival of Betrayal starring Tom Hiddleston, and 2022’s Cyrano de Bergerac with James McAvoy. He has clearly crafted this production with a younger crowd in mind. Taking their seats before the performance, the teens head-bopped along to the kind of techno beats that coincidentally – or otherwise – provide the soundtrack to Zendaya’s latest big-screen hit, the sexy tennis drama Challengers. Nor is it much of a spoiler to point out that Lloyd has deployed giant-screen close-ups of the actors’ faces in real time, even following them backstage at points.
Not everyone was taken in. “What do the cameras add?” wondered Damien, a frustrated 34-year-old Belgian, in the interval. He also lamented the compressed script and minimalist staging. Another group of teenagers we talked to didn’t know that the original play contains a couple of fight scenes, which have been virtually excised from this version. “Oh, that would have been cool,” one 18-year-old said wistfully.
There are appreciative whoops when Holland is at his most Spidey-like. Fans have enthused about the shots of him staring moodily out from the theatre’s roof, as a Marvel hero would. “God, he’s sexy,” one girl muttered behind us as Romeo shed his baggy hoodie to reveal a gym-honed torso beneath a skimpy white tank top. Another mentioned the chemistry between him and his Juliet, played by Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, whose casting provoked racist abuse and forced the show’s producers to release a statement. Meanwhile the women who told us that they fell for Holland after watching his viral lip-synch performance of Rihanna’s Umbrella were presumably delighted when, during a moment of loved-up exuberance, Romeo broke briefly into a crotch-clutching hip grind.
Yet it’s not the first time that Holland has hoofed across the West End stage. Long before Spider-Man, as a child he would bop around the living room of his Kingston-upon-Thames home to his favourite tunes. Then, on Saturday mornings, with his two brothers he would attend hip-hop classes at a leisure centre in Wimbledon, where, at the age of nine, he was advised to try out for the hit musical Billy Elliot.
“He just had that something that is so difficult to explain,” says Lynne Page, the choreographer who ran the dance school and pointed him out to Stephen Daldry, the director of the show. “He was concentrated, focused, consistent and had a natural movement style. It’s not easy for a young boy to attend a dance class – and stick with it.”
Page sat down with the actor and his parents, Nicola, a photographer, and Dominic, a stand-up comedian. She warned them about the arduous training needed to play Billy, and how they must shield him from any disappointment. He had delivered an “extraordinary acting audition”, Daldry says, impressing him and the choreographer Peter Darling with his “balletic shapes and innate rhythm”, but needed to perfect his ballet.
He trained for two years to ensure he landed the part, practising plies, tendus and releves in tights while other kids at his Catholic boys’ school in Wimbledon looked through the windows or played rugby. He was bullied for it, but “it’s just what I had to do if I wanted to get this job”, he later said. Soon Holland was on stage, first as Michael, Billy’s friend, and then, in 2008, as Billy.
A first screen break for Holland came as one of Naomi Watts’s sons in the tsunami drama The Impossible. The casting director Shaheen Baig, also responsible for casting all six series of Peaky Blinders, watched hundreds of audition tapes and was struggling to find a young boy who didn’t “hide their emotions”. She rewatched the tapes, only stopping when she saw Holland’s. Baig and the film’s director, JA Bayona, invited him to an audition where they “pushed him to quite difficult places emotionally but he responded so brilliantly”, she says. “He was mature and grounded for someone so young.”
For Kevin Macdonald’s apocalyptic teen romance How I Live Now, which also starred the rising stars Saoirse Ronan and George MacKay, the director knew “right away” that he wanted to cast Holland. “He had the otherworldly combination of charisma, openness and self-confidence,” he says.
Then came the role of Spider-Man. The casting director Sarah Finn and her team saw an estimated 7,500 hopefuls for Spidey, reportedly including Timothee Chalamet and Sex Education’s Asa Butterfield. Over several months Holland went to seven auditions. Finn reveals that she had already spotted him in The Impossible and was confident that after Billy Elliot he would have “the dedication and discipline to work in a production like this”.
But it wasn’t until his screen test with Robert Downey Jr that Holland stood out from the rest. In the scene Iron Man (Downey Jr) surprises the teenager with an offer to help him to fight Captain America. “Not only did Holland hold his own, he was confident, funny and capable of bouncing the metaphorical ball right back,” Finn explains. “He could make Spider-Man deeply human, then seamlessly also bring the strength and nobility of a superhero.” For his second screen test Holland entered – to everyone’s surprise – with an aerial flip. In June 2016 he got the job. (Marvel’s Stan Lee, co-creator of Spider-Man, said Holland was the “exact age and height” he envisioned when he first wrote the character.)
The first week of filming was mostly stunt scenes. “He was so gung-ho and wanted to do as many takes as possible,” says Jon Watts, the director of Holland and Zendaya’s three Spider-Man films. Later he revealed to the director how much pain he was in.
Holland and Zendaya’s relationship was made public in 2021 when paparazzi captured them kissing in a car at a red light in Los Angeles. But it came as little surprise to Watts. “They made each other laugh. It made things easier while filming – that affection that you see between them on screen is real.”
The pair reportedly own a pounds 3 million six-bedroom pad in Richmond, southwest London. Locals have spotted them popping into Gail’s bakery and Waitrose to peruse the tinned goods aisle. On Instagram Holland recently posted a poster of Challengers with the comment: “I know what I’m doing this weekend.”
Why return to the stage now? Holland has had onscreen misfires trying to shed his superhero suit – if you’ve watched Cherry or Crowded Room, in which he plays, respectively, a heroin addict and a mentally disturbed criminal, you’re quite unusual. It wasn’t just the bad reviews of the latter drama that took their toll. He said: “The mental aspect really beat me up and it took a long time for me to recover afterwards, to sort of get back to reality.” He went to Formula 1 races, played golf and tried therapy. Last year Holland said he had given up drinking after he became “really worried” he had an alcohol problem.
But the films will keep coming. A fourth Spider-Man movie seems inevitable, and the actor is set to play Fred Astaire in a biopic directed by Paul King, the brains behind Paddington and Wonka. In a 2017 interview conducted by, erm, Zendaya, Holland said: “The 20-year goal is to be a film director. The 15-year goal is to win an Oscar.”
Now, though, come the star- crossed lovers. The Mirror has reported that Lloyd’s staging will transfer to Broadway after 12 weeks in London. That’s a lot of rhyming couplets. Watts believes “he will get satisfaction from having that ability to act night in and night out, flat out, on stage. He knows what he’s doing.” Page puts it more simply: “I think his Romeo will break many hearts.”
Throughout the performance the laughter, gasps and groans suggested an audience seduced by a clever piece of casting – for Holland’s totally teenage Romeo, with his mood swings, his mumblings, his nosedive into love and despair, turns out to be, essentially, Spider-Man. At least an iambic pentameter Spider-Man.
“He needs to come out in his Spider-Man suit,” one wit quipped at the stage door afterwards as the crowd clogged up St Martin’s Lane, desperate for a sighting. The previous night Holland had done his own impromptu balcony scene from the theatre terrace. This time he just gave a brief wave then hopped into his chauffeured car.
Oh well. There never was a story of more web and woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo. If only Zendaya had been there to see it.
The Times
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