Tom Holland made headlines in 2021 when he told GQ magazine that “if I’m playing Spider-Man after I’m 30, I’ve done something wrong.” Well, not only is Holland officially 30 right now but he’s also got a new “Spider-Man” movie, “Brand New Day,” opening in theaters July 31 and does not have any immediate plans to stop playing the web-slinger. So is Holland eating his words? Not exactly.
“It’s funny, I saw that quote pop up somewhere recently and I kind of reeled, because I was trying to remember what I meant,” Holland recently told GQ magazine for the publication’s summer cover story on Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” adaptation.
“I think the point of it is that I would love to pass the baton on, and I haven’t achieved that yet,” the actor explained. “It’s definitely something that we talk about a lot at the studio. So maybe I need to change the quote to 37. I could also have been trying to leverage Sony and scare them into thinking I wasn’t going to do ‘Spider-Man 4’ now that I had a new deal on the horizon. So I don’t know what it could have been. It could’ve been part of a strategy to create fear.”
Holland concluded, “I think the truth is that playing Spider-Man has been the joy of my life. I now kind of stand on the plinth of like, I’ll do it for as long as they’ll have me.”
Over the years, Holland has played a main role in the workings of his ‘Spider-Man” movies. He called on Sony Pictures to delay the production of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” so that he could act in Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” and he made a personal plea to Disney’s CEO Bob Iger in 2019 in which he cried over the phone while asking Disney and Sony to reach a new deal to keep his Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“Tom reached out to folks who worked for me, ‘Could I please have Bob’s email address or phone number?’ Of course I’m very protected and they were very careful,” Iger said at the time. “I said, ‘Sure, have him contact me.’ And he did. We spoke. Basically he made a… he cried on the phone… it was clear that he cared so much and actually we care a lot about him. He’s a great Spider-Man. I actually felt for him, and it was clear that the fans wanted this to happen. So after I got off the phone with him I made a couple of phone calls to our team at Disney Studios and then I decided to call the head of Sony and I said, ‘We gotta figure out a way to get this done.’ For Tom and for the fans. And we did. That’s how it happened. He called me and I called them.”
Head over to GQ magazine’s website to read “The Odyssey” summer cover story in its entirety.
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