Tom Holland Is In the Center of the Web

“This is going to sound like complete bullshit, but I swear to you that this is true,” Tom Holland says. “Have you ever heard of cognitive dreaming?”

We’ve been talking for a couple of hours at this point, and conversation—as it tends to, after long enough—has drifted onto the subject of dreams. I’ve been having nightmares lately, I tell him. Anxiety. This is something Tom Holland knows all about. He is a terrible sleeper; a sleepwalker; a sleep undresser, even. (“Four out of 10 sleeps I wake up completely naked.”) As it happens, he has a trick for dealing with nightmares, and because Tom Holland is Tom Holland—the actor who put the friendly back into your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man and is just famously, energetically, irresistibly nice—of course he’s happy to help.

“Okay, so I’ll tell you how you do it. Essentially, when you’re asleep, your brain is working way faster than it is when it’s awake. Jon Watts [Holland’s director on three Spider-Man movies] told me this, and it has worked. If you’re in a dream and you read something, say, a stop sign, and you turn around, when you look back at the stop sign it will have changed. So what you do is—and this is where it sounds stupid—you set an alarm for every hour of the day when you’re awake. When the alarm goes off, you read something. So I’m reading—”

At this point Holland looks around his bedroom, which is sparse, an unmade bed and a half-open wardrobe behind him, low fall sun streaming in the window, and alights upon a packet of pistachios. “—Roasted and salted. You turn away, you look back at it: Roasted and salted. Okay, I’m not dreaming. What happens is when you do it for a long time, you start to do that in your sleep. Sometimes, if I’m having a really bad dream, I’ll look at a sign and go, ‘Oh, I’m dreaming.’ And then you have free rein to do whatever you want.”

So you can influence your dreams?

“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.

To understand how Holland became a multiple–tentpole-movie-carrying action hero, it’s simplest to start with ballet. Holland grew up in Kingston Upon Thames, an upmarket town just south of London. There, age nine, he was spotted at a dance class by a West End choreographer, who suggested he audition for the Billy Elliot musical. Holland practiced ballet for two years to land the part, “just doing pliés and tendus and relevés. Développés—I hate développés so much.” (That’s the one where you extend your leg up and out until you look like this: Y.)

Finally, Holland was chosen to play Billy. His parents invited everyone they knew. Only, the day of his debut, Holland came down with tonsillitis. Not wanting to disappoint anyone, he didn’t say anything. “I was like, ‘I can’t miss this, because all of these people are coming,’ ” Holland says. He delivered a flawless performance, and nobody even noticed he was sick until the following morning, when he was taken to the doctor and given the rest of the week off.

“I got the nickname Sick Note, which frustrates me to my core, even today,” says Holland. “I was too young to do that show. I was incredibly underdeveloped as a kid, and I would get sick, or I would be tired, or I would get injured, and I’d need to take a break because you’re doing three shows a week, rehearsing every single day. Now as an actor I push through everything, because I’m not going to be Sick Note.”

When Holland started making it in Hollywood—a debut in 2012’s The Impossible, followed by small parts in Wolf Hall and In the Heart of the Sea—he leaned in to his balletic talents, literally throwing himself into every job. (This approach is written in the subtle S-bend of his nose, which he has broken twice, once on the set of The Lost City of Z, and again on Chaos Walking.) “I’m like a Duracell battery. I’m the bunny,” Holland says. It’s that energy that comes through onscreen, whether he’s doing backflips as Spider-Man, or pulling on fishnets and grinding to Rihanna on Lip Sync Battle: determination bordering on desperation. “Anytime I’ve ever watched him work, he does it 150 percent,” his Spider-Man costar Zendaya says. “It’s incredible to watch.”

“One of my biggest faults is that I’m an impossible people pleaser,” Holland says. “I don’t like the idea of people not liking me. So I will do whatever I can do to make that not the case.”

In 2015, Holland beat thousands of other young actors for the role of Spider-Man in a multi-film deal between Sony (which owns the rights) and Marvel. “He had a vulnerability and a wit, and an immense likability that felt to me like Peter Parker from the comics,” Russo recalls. Unlike his predecessors, Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire, Holland’s Parker was still a child, burdened with a responsibility that he finds overwhelming. Holland could relate. While most kids his age were still sitting exams and asking around for a prom date, he found himself in a full-time job, only his coworkers were Robert Downey Jr., Michael Keaton, and Jake Gyllenhaal. Nonetheless, he figured out a way to infuse his nerves into his performance. “I was given this piece of advice as a kid that was really helpful, which is: If you think about the actual physical feeling of being nervous, it’s the same physical feeling as being excited,” Holland says. “So I’ve just convinced myself all my life that when I’m nervous, I’m really excited.”

It was from his older peers that Holland learned both his craft and how to navigate fame, which arrived not in a slow accumulation but in one disorienting rush. Suddenly he was studying for a master’s degree in how to stay on the rails, from actors who in some cases had fallen off and found a way back. Holland latched on to every potential mentor, sucking everything in. “Some told me, ‘You should go out and buy a Ferrari and live in Malibu and live the high life.’ Some [would] say, ‘I wouldn’t do interviews with chat shows if you don’t want to,’ ” he says. “I’ve kind of found a middle ground.” (He bought an electric Porsche.) He said yes to everything—the press tours, the TV appearances, the YouTube stunts. By 21, he had his entire career arc planned out, in 2017 telling Interview magazine in response to questions posed by Zendaya, “The 20-year goal is to be a film director. The 15-year goal is to win an Oscar.”

In the middle of all that, he was growing up, trying to be a normal person, or as close to normal as one can be inside the strange crucible of fame. “The ages between 15 and 21 are when you figure out who you’re going to be,” he says. “When everyone’s telling you that you’re the best thing in the world, you can grow up and believe that.” He found companionship in actors his own age, particularly his Spider-Man costars Jacob Batalon and Zendaya; Zendaya, in particular, became his guide to his new reality. “Having her in my life was so instrumental to my sanity,” he says. “She is so good at being the role model for young guys and girls. When anyone comes up, like, ‘Can I have a picture?,’ it’s never a bad time. Whereas my initial reaction was: ‘Why are you talking to me? Leave me alone.’ ”

Zendaya taught him that fame is work too. So he learned to smile for every picture, hug every fan, do the meet and greets at Disneyland. To always be on. An example: Just recently he was walking in London, when a group of guys started following him and taking pictures. “Something had happened in my life and it really put me in a bad mood,” he says. “I was just trying to keep my head together, and I turned around and told them to get lost.” A reasonable person might think this a fair response to being stalked by strangers. But after a few yards, Holland turned around and apologized. “I have to remind myself that being Spider-Man is more of a responsibility than just having a job,” he says later. “There are kids out there who are bullied at school who don’t fit in, and Spider-Man is their fucking go-to guy, you know? And at the moment I’m that guy.”

The day after Holland emerges from quarantine, we meet for dinner at the Chiltern Firehouse, a luxury hotel in Marylebone, a neighborhood in central London. Holland likes it here; it’s discreet. There’s a scene in Uncharted where Holland’s character, Nathan Drake, works behind a bar, and so Holland would come in to do shifts with the staff, learning how to mix cocktails, practice trick pours, toss bottles around. We’re shown to a table called the Snug, a space barely six feet square, with a sofa, a privacy curtain, and its own tiny open fire—in other words, the make-out table. Holland is unbothered. He squeezes into the space, wearing pinstripe pants and a shirt the color of caramel, his hair falling on his forehead in kinks. It seems ridiculous, but after seeing him play teenagers onscreen for so long, it’s startling to see Holland as a man. There’s a heft to him in person. His posture is incredible. His skin is luminous. His biceps are like suspension cables. On Uncharted, Holland worked with Mark Wahlberg, who is notably, in Holland’s words, “an absolute unit.” (British for absolutely humongous.) “I saw him walk onto set in his costume and I was like, ‘Fuck, he is twice my size,’ ” says Holland. “After the [COVID] lockdown, we had five months off, and I just ate and trained and ate and trained. When I got back on set, the first thing he said to me was”—here he puts on his best Wahlberg—‘Wow, somebody has been training.’ ”

As a young actor, Holland obsessed about his height—he’s 5 feet 8, although his physicality is such that you don’t really notice—going so far as to wear lifts in his shoes. “I’d do this thing on red carpets where I would stand closer to the photographers than the people behind me [to look taller],” he says. He has since learned to focus on what he can control. “I cannot do anything about my height,” he says. “I can put on more muscle.” For his debut as Spider-Man, in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, the costume department put him in a muscle suit. Over six movies the suit has gotten smaller and smaller: “Now I just have a penis cup,” he says.

Holland may only be 25, but lately he’s started to feel the toll of years spent flipping and swinging around on wires. “I was going to the gym in the morning like, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve must have torn something in my leg,’ and the guys were like, ‘You haven’t, you’re just tired and you’re getting older.’ ” His intense schedule meant he had only three days between finishing Uncharted in Berlin and starting work on No Way Home in Atlanta. “I never realized how lucky I am that Spider-Man wears a mask, because when he’s bouncing around and flying from buildings, that’s all CG. In Uncharted it’s just me in a henley and cargo pants,” he says. By the time shooting wrapped, he had developed tendinitis, and hurt all over. “That film absolutely broke me.”

There are times when, because of Holland’s exuberance—or perhaps his naiveté—he takes on more than he should. While filming the last two Avengers, he would spend three days on set in Atlanta, then get on a plane to London and do two days on the set of The Current War, only to fly back to Atlanta again. “I remember, for a large portion of the film, Benedict [Cumberbatch, his costar in all three movies] had a double in Avengers while he was shooting in London,” he says. “I didn’t know that was a thing.” While filming Cherry, he lost nearly a quarter of his body weight, adopting a crash diet and running 10 miles a day in a trash bag. “My energy levels were so low,” Holland says. After years of being the Duracell bunny, Holland was burned-out.

Looking back, Holland now realizes he was probably burned out for a long time. He recalls the press tour for Spider-Man: Homecoming, for which he traveled to 17 countries, doing junkets and pumping out backflips on request. By the last step of the tour, in China, “I was really ill,” he says. “But I didn’t say no. I was like, ‘I can do it, I can do it, I can do it.’ ” I’m not going to be Sick Note. Then one day, in a press conference, his body said no for him. He walked off the stage and threw up everywhere. “I was under a lot of pressure to finish the day’s work. That was the first time I was really like, ‘No, I’m done now. I’ve given you everything.’ ”

Here is Tom Holland’s nightmare. It started a few years ago, when he was just beginning to find fame, and now it happens pretty regularly, especially when he’s working, which is to say all the time. You see, among Holland’s nighttime afflictions is sleep paralysis, a kind of disconnection between your brain and your musculoskeletal system that can happen in the moment of waking. “You’re awake, but you can’t move,” Holland says.

In the nightmare, Holland wakes up with sleep paralysis. Only then he realizes that he’s not alone, that his bedroom is filled with paparazzi. They’re looming over him, bulbs popping, and Holland’s just stuck there, frozen, panicking. “They’re all there, and I’m looking for my publicist, like, Where is the person who’s supposed to be protecting me? What’s going on? And then when I am able to move again, I turn the lights on, and it’s over,” Holland says. “And I think, Oh, my God, I’m in my room, I’m fine. There’s no one here. But then I will get up and look for a recording device or something that someone has put in my room.”

Hence: cognitive dreaming.

But the funny thing about fame is that just as you start to find your dreams coming true, so, too, can nightmares. And so it was this summer, when pictures emerged in the tabloid press of Holland and Zendaya in a car in L.A., kissing. It’s a small thing, a kiss. And ordinarily, two 20-somethings in a relationship embracing at a stoplight would remain what it is, a moment of intimacy between two people. Only in this case, that kiss was instantly beamed around the world, to be dissected in reaction videos, “relationship timelines,” and Entertainment Tonight. (Page Six: “Zendaya, Tom Holland finally confirm they’re dating with steamy car makeout.” As if they had any choice.) Holland’s private life had been in the press before, but this was different. Holland’s and Zendaya’s fans had long obsessed over whether the pair were together (“tom holland and zendaya flirting for 8 minutes straight”: 1.5 million views). Some argued it must be a publicity stunt. “One of the downsides of our fame is that privacy isn’t really in our control anymore, and a moment that you think is between two people that love each other very much is now a moment that is shared with the entire world,” Holland says. He has said very little publicly about the relationship, and you sense it’s something he’s still navigating, trying to work out how much to give. “I’ve always been really adamant to keep my private life private, because I share so much of my life with the world anyway,” he says. “We sort of felt robbed of our privacy.”

You weren’t ready to talk about it.

“I don’t think it’s about not being ready. It’s just that we didn’t want to.”

Holland knows that he’ll soon be on a global press tour, facing endless questions about it. “It’s not a conversation that I can have without her,” he says. “You know, I respect her too much to say… This isn’t my story. It’s our story. And we’ll talk about what it is when we’re ready to talk about it together.”

“It was quite strange and weird and confusing and invasive,” Zendaya tells me later, by phone. “The equal sentiment [we both share] is just that when you really love and care about somebody, some moments or things, you wish were your own.… I think loving someone is a sacred thing and a special thing and something that you want to deal with and go through and experience and enjoy amongst the two people that love each other.”

There are little things Holland is still hung up on, like: How did the photographer get in front of them? Over the past few years, as his private bubble has gotten smaller, he’s become more protective of it. There’s a reason he doesn’t go out, why he keeps the same staff from job to job, why he spends his free time on private golf courses (although he also just loves golf). Because here is something Tom Holland has learned: The more that you say yes to everything, the more of you they will take, and take, until there is nothing left just for you. “People mistake my kindness as weakness,” he says. “Sometimes I see people trying to take advantage of me because I’m a nice person. Let me tell you, when you’re a 19-year-old kid, they really do take advantage of you. You don’t know any better. Now I look back and go, ‘Wow, I wish someone had told me that I could say no.’ ”

Halfway through the making of No Way Home, Holland did something he almost never does: He refused. No Way Home, the climax of Holland’s Spider-Man trilogy, picks up immediately after 2019’s Far From Home, with Peter Parker being unmasked as Spider-Man and falsely accused of the murder of Mysterio. (Oddly, Parker and Zendaya’s MJ spend the opening scene being chased through New York by the press. “It’s art imitating life, except I can’t swing away in real life,” Holland says.) Unable to handle the fallout, Parker asks Doctor Strange to intervene, accidentally causing a cataclysm of multiverse-breaking proportions. Somehow—I haven’t seen the movie—that cataclysm prompts the return of familiar adversaries from Sony’s previous Spider-Man iterations, including Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus and, if rumors are to be believed, Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin and Jamie Foxx’s Electro. “When they first came up with a concept of what they wanted to try and do, it was the impossible concept,” Holland says. “But they pulled it off.”

Ever since news of those castings appeared, the internet has obsessed over whether or not Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield are also returning. “No one believes me, but they’re not in the film,” Holland says. (If this is a lie, and it well might be, then don’t hate him. That’s work too. And really, isn’t it better not knowing?)

The production of No Way Home sounds like total chaos. As the first day of filming approached, several key actors hadn’t signed on yet. “Some people were trying to figure out whether they wanted to do it, and we needed all of them or none,” Holland says. The movie was reportedly going to be released after the upcoming Doctor Strange sequel, but when that film was delayed by COVID, it was decided that No Way Home would go first, requiring changes to the plot. Even once filming was underway, the script was being rewritten on an almost daily basis. “You could ask the director, ‘What happens in act three?’ And his response would be, ‘I’m still trying to figure it out,’ ” Holland says.

Anyway, the day finally came to shoot the big finale, “the crescendo scene, like, is this really fucking happening? It’s crazy.” Only, it wasn’t working. “I kept stopping and being like, ‘I’m so sorry, I just don’t believe what I’m saying.’ ” The director, Jon Watts, took him aside, and Holland told him: It wasn’t me. The scene was wrong. “We sat down, we went through it, and we came up with a new idea,” Holland says. “Then we pitched it to the writers, they rewrote it, and it works great.”

It’s a story about standing up for yourself, and about how Holland has grown. “As a kid, a lot of my confidence was really fake,” he says. “But, really, inside I was, ‘Oh, my God, I’m fucking terrified.’ ” (Russo: “If he was faking his confidence, he is a hell of an actor.”) Because here’s the thing: That story about nerves being the same as excitement? It’s true. But if you don’t let your real feelings out, they tend to show up in other places, like in your dreams.

Holland doesn’t have to fake it anymore. Don’t get him wrong: He still wants you to like him. He just doesn’t want to have to give you everything to do it. “I actually learned this from Elizabeth Olsen,” he says. “She gave me an amazing piece of advice: ‘No’ is a full sentence. ‘No’ is enough.”

Holland has spent six years as Spider-Man. If he chooses to, he could easily do another 20. He is still two decades younger than Robert Downey Jr. was in Iron Man.

“I’ve talked to him about doing, like, 100 more,” Pascal tells me. “I’m never going to make Spider-Man movies without him. Are you kidding me?”

Holland, however, isn’t so sure. “Maybe it is time for me to move on. Maybe what’s best for Spider-Man is that they do a Miles Morales film. I have to take Peter Parker into account as well, because he is an important part of my life,” he says. But also: “If I’m playing Spider-Man after I’m 30, I’ve done something wrong.”

He has other ambitions. “He talks about being James Bond a lot,” says Jacob Batalon, his Spider-Man costar. “A lot a lot.” He’s been writing a script with his brother, Harry, and is currently gearing up to shoot The Crowded Room, an Apple TV+ drama about dissociative identity disorder. Pascal told me that she wants Holland to play Fred Astaire in a forthcoming movie (which might be a rare perfect casting). But after that? Holland doesn’t know.

If he could, he’d spend six months backpacking around Europe. He’d go clubbing, get “sloppy drunk.” He’d go to Glastonbury, stand in the middle of the crowd, feel again what it’s like to be just one person in a mass of joyful bodies. He would, in other words, be a guy in his 20s, exploring what it feels like to be alive. “I just can’t do that,” he says.

He’s certain of something: “I definitely don’t think I want to be an actor for the rest of my life.” Before Hollywood, Holland briefly trained as a carpenter, a craft he still loves. “I’ve always been really good with my hands. If something’s broken, I can always figure out a way of fixing it.” He has this romantic idea of “buying apartment buildings and renting them out cheaper than they need to be, because I don’t need the money.”

Lately, Holland has had another dream. It’s a variation on a common theme: He’d met a woman, got her pregnant. Once, he’d have found it terrifying. “You don’t know what you’re going to do. How am I going to tell my mum and dad?” But this time he wasn’t nervous at all. “After, I thought… I kind of miss my little girl now.” Holland has always wanted to be a father. “I’d be very content with just being a stay-at-home dad, and producing a film here and there,” he says. That’s not to say that will happen right now. “I might start shooting The Crowded Room and go, ‘You know what, this is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life.’ Or I might do Spider-Man 4, 5, and 6, finish when I’m 32, and never make another. I’m not sure what I want to do.” That’s the point. He’s in control.

“Now as I’m getting a little bit older, I’m like, It’s good to have things to work for. Just don’t give 100 percent of your energy towards it,” Holland says. “I’m trying to live my life a little bit more freely.”

Oliver Franklin-Wallis is a writer based in England.

A version of this story originally appeared in the December/January 2022 issue with the title “The Center of the Web.”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Sharif Hamza
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Grooming by Larry King
Tailoring by Michelle Warner
Set design by Sean Thomson at The Magnet Agency
Set assistant, Maximilian Kindersley
Produced by Farago Projects
Location: Peckham Liberal Club/Location Collective