Tom Holland has demonstrated a tireless versatility through all 15 years of his young but prolific career, from his stage launch in the musical Billy Elliot to his film debut in the disaster film The Impossible, from an emaciated turn in In the Heart of the Sea to his stint as a PTSD-afflicted, drug-addicted veteran in Cherry.
While he remains best known for playing Peter Parker in Marvel’s Avengers and Spider-Man movies, Holland, now 27, has no intention to let his iconic alter-ego keep him from opportunities to expand his filmography.
“I’m not really concerned about being pigeonholed,” Holland tells us while promoting his latest project, the twisty Apple TV+ dramatic thriller series The Crowded Room, in which he plays Danny Sullivan, a seemingly harmless young man arrested for a shooting in 1979 New York. “I really look at my career from my own set of eyes and I worry less about what people think about whether or not they see me as Spider-Man or whether or not they see me as Danny. I see each and every film as a personal achievement. Whether I’m proud of a film or not is really how I kind of weigh up my emotions about something. I try not to look at reviews. I try not to hear what people say around the world. So it’s not something that I actively do.
“I feel like my agents and I have navigated the industry in a really good way over the last 10 years. But that said, if I just play Spider-Man for the rest of my life, I’d still be the luckiest kid alive. So there’s no complaints from me here.”
While nothing is official, there’s a decent chance Holland will be Spider-Man for a few more years.
Amy Pascal, the former Sony Pictures Chairman who remains a producer on all things Spider-Verse, told Variety last week that a fourth MCU Spider-Man movie, presumably starring Holland, is still in the works but has been slowed by the work stoppage due to the Writers Guild of America strike. (In a separate interview, Holland told Variety that he had been having very early meetings with the studio, but those were put on pause in solidarity with the writers’ strike.)
However, when pressed Holland declined to say too much about Spidey 4.
“I’m going to have to plead the fifth there because I’m not prepared to start talking about the future of Spider-Man,” he told us.
“As everyone knows, I love him. He changed my life. I love the character. Should we find a way to tell his story and do justice to him, we will do so. But if we can’t find a way to do that, and if we can’t find a way to compete with the third one [2021’s mega-hit Spider-Man: No Way Home], then you know, he’ll swing off into the sunset.”
The Crowded Room premieres June 9 on Apple TV+.
Watch the trailer:
