Tom Holland Breaks Free: Talking Zendaya, ‘The Crowded Room’ and the Future of Spider-Man

After six stints as the web crawler, the 27-year-old Brit opens up about the pressures of mega-celebrity, his superstar girlfriend and his “Spider-Boys” group chat with Tobey and Andrew.

Tom Holland is having a rough morning. Not because he partied too hard the night before — though the Marvel Studios superstar had enough reasons to, what with it being his birthday and the world premiere at New York’s MoMA of The Crowded Room, the Apple TV+ series that he both stars in and executive produced.

But Holland quit drinking alcohol a year and a half ago. No, this particular migraine comes from waking up to learn that Crowded Room — what Holland deems the “hardest thing I’ve ever done” (this according to a guy who has played Spider-Man in six feature films) — has been met by rough early reviews.

“It was a kick in the teeth,” Holland admits, unprompted, over eggs Benedict on the quiet terrace of a hotel in SoHo. “Rolling over, looking up the reviews, and then all of a sudden I was like, ‘Wow. That’s a bad review.’ Sometimes there’s a redeeming quality in there. There was nothing.”

Holland speaks loudly and confidently and in a thick London accent — he grew up there and still calls it home. At first it’s disorienting. Most of his characters are American and voiced in milder tones. Onscreen, he is jokey and self-effacing. Speaking to a journalist, he’s serious and a bit guarded. He makes rock-solid eye contact whenever he wants to convey a point. He is pale, lean — whatever the ideal body fat percentage is, he has it — and delicately handsome. He’s wearing loose-fitting jeans and a Moscot T-shirt featuring a vintage drawing of a man taking an eye test.

Every star learns to take their knocks in stride. And at 27, Holland is already a savvy veteran of the Hollywood game. He certainly still looks young enough to don the Spider-Man suit once again, perhaps even for another trilogy. Meetings to determine the fate of his Peter Parker are in fact already underway. But he knows that career longevity will ultimately hinge on every move he makes outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Uncharted, his first swing at a non-Spider-Man action franchise, was a win: The 2022 video game adaptation earned $400 million worldwide on a $120 million budget. But Cherry, a 2021 drama directed by the Russo brothers in which he played a strung-out heroin addict, drew a humdrum response.

Initial reviews of The Crowded Room seemed no better. But right after bringing them up, Holland brightens: “There will be good ones. There will be. I try to have a healthy outlook on all that sort of stuff and respect everyone’s opinion.”

As if he willed them into existence, more encouraging evaluations soon began ticking the Tomatometer back up. And Holland’s performance in Crowded Room — he plays Danny Sullivan, a psychologically distraught man accused of a shooting at Rockefeller Center — was widely singled out for praise. (It’s the long and twisty path to the “big revelation” at the center of the show — Danny’s diagnosis — that rubbed some critics the wrong way.)

Holland’s brother, Harry, 24, tagged along to the New York premiere to lend emotional support. But his girlfriend, Zendaya — whom he met on the set of 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming (she plays his love interest, MJ) — did not.

“We’ve been to events together before,” says Holland. As recently as March, he accompanied the 27-year-old Euphoria star to Las Vegas, where she was presented an award at CinemaCon. While there, they took in an Usher concert, which made headlines and trended on social media. Just about everything they do, especially together, trends on social media. “But she’s visiting her grandma,” he continues. “We’re two very busy people, and we’re on the opposite sides of the world at this present time, so she couldn’t come.”

Holland takes a deep breath and shakes it all off: the distance from his girlfriend, the frustrating reviews, the multibillion-dollar expectations resting on his wiry shoulders.

“The thing is,” he says, “I love my job. I love my friends. I’m not worried about what people think. The only thing I really care about is how I feel. And right now, I feel really happy and excited for people to see this show.”

I reply, “People seem to enjoy you a lot,” citing his 67 million Instagram followers.

“It seems that way,” he says. “I just hope it stays that way.”

Holland found The Crowded Room while filming 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, the capper to the blockbuster trilogy that came out of Sony and Marvel Studios’ 2015 agreement to share rights to the enormously popular character. Anchored by Holland in the title role, the deal paid off in a huge way: Despite bowing amid the COVID-19 pandemic, No Way Home earned $1.9 billion worldwide and became the third-highest-grossing film domestically of all time, behind 2019’s Avengers: Endgame — which also features Holland’s Spider-Man — and 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Holland was “at that stage where I was looking for my next job” when his agents caught wind of a project based on the 1981 nonfiction novel The Minds of Billy Milligan, by Daniel Keyes. The Crowded Room had been bouncing around Hollywood since the early 1990s, when James Cameron adapted Minds of Billy Milligan into a feature film script. (It was Cameron who coined the title The Crowded Room.) Cameron abandoned the project, and various directors circled it in the years to follow, including the late Joel Schumacher and, at one point, David Fincher. In 2015, Leonardo DiCaprio signed on as a potential star. None of it came to pass.

Eventually Akiva Goldsman — who won an Oscar for 2001’s A Beautiful Mind and more recently has been a showrunner on several Star Trek series — found his way to the material. Goldsman was drawn to the idea of a young male subjected to horrible trauma at a young age and how that trauma affects the brain. Further along in the development process, he chose to fictionalize the true story of Billy Milligan, who stood trial for a string of rapes, and instead turn it into the tale of the far more sympathetic Danny Sullivan, accused of a victimless crime for reasons that don’t reveal themselves until halfway through the series.

Holland and Goldsman met about the project — then set up at Apple TV+ — in early 2021. At that point, it was going to be a direct adaptation of The Minds of Billy Milligan. “I read the book and was really blown away by the opportunity it presented as an actor,” Holland says. “I instantly felt safe with Akiva. I trusted him. It was a pretty easy yes from there.”

The trust went both ways. “He has a superpower, which I think may come from his early experiences as a dancer,” says Goldsman, referring to Holland’s ability to instantly see a scene in three dimensions from the page. “Tom will take one look at the set with the scene in his hand and he will know where the blocking is going to end up. I’ve just never seen anything like it.”

The project came along at a time when Holland was having his own mental health struggles, which he revealed in a video posted to his Instagram on Aug. 13. “I find Instagram and Twitter to be overstimulating, to be overwhelming,” he told his followers. “I get caught up and I spiral when I read things about me online and ultimately it’s very detrimental to my mental state, so I’ve decided to take a step back and delete the app.” I ask Holland whether that disclosure figured into him taking on something like The Crowded Room.

“I wouldn’t say I particularly have a history of issues with mental health,” he says. “I just feel like I am a young person living in a world where we are expected to share every moment online. We are under the pressures of public opinion and other people’s opinions, and you’ve got these pressures of delivering to a certain standard. And it’s stressful. It’s hard.”

Then Holland’s thought transforms: It’s not just that he’s a young person whose life is laid bare online. It’s that he’s one of the world’s most famous young people, living constantly under the glare of the public eye. There is no escaping the scrutiny.

“It’s tough when every time you leave your front door, you are working. You’re on camera. I can’t walk around New York without clicking everywhere I go. And social media was bringing that outside world into my house. I just had to get rid of it. I needed to get back to reality, remind myself of who I am and where I’m from, and just live my life as normally as possible, in my abnormal way. Which is my career, I guess,” he says.