“Owen Cooper Would Be Awesome”: Tom Holland Explains Why the Adolescence Star Should Be the Next Spider-Man
If anyone should have a Spidey sense for these things, it’s Tom Holland.
The British actor has spent the past decade playing Marvel’s web-slinging neighbourhood superhero and, even before his latest outing Spider-Man: Brand New Day hits cinemas next month, he has already tipped a future replacement.
Asked who he’d like to see follow in his footsteps, Holland doesn’t hesitate.
“Owen Cooper would be awesome,” he tells Esquire in his new cover interview for the July/August issue, which you can read here. “Obviously, he’s super-talented and he’s the talk of the town right now.”
It’s high praise from someone who knows a thing or two about being plucked from relative obscurity and thrust into the global spotlight. Cooper, at just 16, has become one of the most talked-about young British actors following his breakout role in the Netflix drama Adolescence, where he plays Jamie Miller, a troubled teenager who stabs a female classmate to death.
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His performance did more than just turn heads; it made history. The Warrington-born teenager became the youngest actor ever to win both the BAFTA Television Award for Best Supporting Actor and a Golden Globe in the same category, a rare double that immediately placed him in a different orbit to most rising stars.
It’s a kind of swift trajectory that Holland recognises, and one he reflects on with a sense of responsibility as he looks beyond his own tenure in the role.
He clearly sees something of himself in Cooper. After all, like Cooper, he beat hundreds of young boys for his breakout role, too. In Holland’s case, that was Billy Elliott The Musical – after a “pretty savage” audition that his granny took him to in 2006. “One of the reasons I’ve always had such a healthy relationship with my career, is that it was never really something I was looking for,” he says.
Thinking back to his early Marvel days, he’s clear about the value of having someone to guide you through the intensity of it all.
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“In the way that Robert Downey was such a mentor for me in my first three movies, I would love to be that person for whoever is next,” he says.
Downey’s Iron Man, of course, doubled as a kind of on-screen father figure to Holland’s Peter Parker in the early Marvel films, mirroring that real-life mentorship dynamic.
To be clear: there is no suggestion that Holland is planning to hang up his mask just yet. But when the time does come, he says he would like to remain involved as a producer, even if, as he puts it, a producing credit is “pretty tough” to secure.
Speaking exclusively to Esquire UK ahead of the release of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Holland also reflected on the fourth instalment of his Spider-Man run.
“This movie is a real mystery and for a large portion of the film, even Spider-Man is a little bit at odds and lost and is like, ‘What is going on?’” he says. “We’re just trying to find ways to make this movie feel like a detective movie.”
