Here is what happens when you interview a celebrity at Pinewood Studios. You drive in through the main gates, head into reception and give the reason for your visit. You are provided with a security pass and a map of the 200-acre lot. There is code name for the film in production: I am, if anyone were to ask, visiting the set of The Blue Oasis . And then, once the automatic barriers finally lift, you embark on a tour of British film history: the Sean Connery Stage on your right, 007 Drive on your left. There is a diversion on Goldfinger Avenue, so I take an alternative route: looping in and out of warehouses until I reach the outer road, eventually parking near the Stanley Kubrick Building, which is opposite the Richard Attenborough Stage. With my Dictaphone, I head into the altogether less fun-sounding L&M Block to interview somebody whose name might one day grace this building, should the powers-that-be at Pinewood ever feel like a refresh.
Tom Holland arrives right on time for our interview, bounding into our — admittedly slightly sad-looking — greenroom. Holland, one of our most recognisable movie stars, could pass for any other twenty-something today: he is dressed casually and his hair has reached the length where you can identify his trade-mark waves. It’s a bright April morning, the first stretch of sun we have had all year. He’s here to put the “finishing touches” on Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the fourth instalment of Holland’s tenure of the web-slinging New Yorker. “The movie is already the best Spider-Man movie that we’ve ever made,” he says, so this period — a few months before the film’s release at the end of July — is all about adding “extra layers”, such as squeezing in more jokes as well as weaving together an intricate villain plotline. “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?’ We’re just trying to find ways to make this movie feel like a detective movie.”
Matt Healy
Rugby shirt, £225; rugby shirt (worn underneath), £175, both Polo Ralph Lauren
Given Marvel’s ironclad operations, as well as the unavoidable fact that it’s not yet finished, I haven’t been able to see any of this new film. But from the trailer, which teases appearances from fan-favourite baddies including The Punisher, The Hand and Scorpion, I can just about understand what Holland is getting at. In this instalment, directed by franchise newcomer Destin Daniel Cretton, there is clearly a lot going on. And Peter Parker, now out of school and in his early twenties, seems at a crossroads. “It’s a bit of a risk,” the British actor says of the new movie, “but I think it really pays off.”
You get the sense that whatever shape this film was going to take — Spider-Man: The Musical! Spider-Man: The Rom-Com! — it would pay off. The first three Tom Holland Spider-Man films have made $3.9bn worldwide. The third outing, 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, was a pop-culture Moment, bringing together two former Spideys (Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield) in a multiverse-spanning event that surely made a few millennials question their mortality: there’s nothing like realising you have lived through three incarnations of your favourite super-hero. That film — which ends with Peter Parker fading back into anonymity thanks to a spell cast by Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) — also had the distinct feeling of an ending. Not just of a trilogy, but perhaps a chapter for Holland. Maguire only made three films; Garfield exited after just two. Holland has appeared as Spider-Man in a Captain America film, three standalone films and two instalments of the Avengers. That’s a lot of Spandex for a young man.
“At the end of the last one, I’d finished my contract that I signed as an 18-year-old,” Holland, now 30, says. “I have been very open that I was on the fence about making this fourth instalment.” He’s not kidding. In podcasts and interviews, Holland had been hesitant. Most explosively, he suggested, in a 2021 interview with GQ magazine, that it may be time to move on: “If I’m playing Spider-Man after I’m 30, I’ve done something wrong.” Today he calls that line “really stupid”. “I don’t even really know what that means,” he admits, clearly a little exasperated at his former self. Besides, who among us could not be lured back into a billion-dollar franchise?
Matt Healy//Esquire
Coat, jacket and trousers, all price on request, Valentino. Ring, £6,050, Cartier. Socks, £20, Falke. Loafers, £200, Bobbies
Matt Healy
“This is Tom’s fourth Spider-Man movie,” Cretton tells me over email. “And for some actors, the temptation would be to phone it in or become jaded with the process. But Tom is the opposite.” Cretton lists the actor’s professional creds — knowing everyone’s name, turning up on time — but pinpoints something else: his sense of joy. “The amount of fun we had making this movie,” Cretton says, “almost seems criminal.”
Holland says he put in place “safety blankets” so that he could be more involved in the film’s pre- and post-production. It’s why he was able to see the first cut of this film. He clearly cares about the character: he explains that he has spent hours online listening to podcasts and watching YouTube videos to work out what “the fans were yearning for”. Take, for example, the suit. Holland researched what people liked about Maguire and Garfield’s versions, to design the look for this new instalment. The team lowered the belt to create the impression of a longer torso as well as the boots to do the same for his legs. “Obviously,” Holland is quick to note, “I’m limited as a vertically challenged person.”
All of that sounds nerdy. It is nerdy. But it’s working. Excitement for this sequel, some five years in the making, is feverish. The trailer has 34 million views and counting. When I check out a Reddit forum for reactions to the first glimpses of Spidey’s new suit, the reviews are very positive. They love the sleeves! They love the comic-book accuracy! There’s a good chance Holland has already read them.
Matt Healy
Hoodie, £1,200; shorts, £860, both Dior. Socks, £17, Pantherella
Holland’s journey to stardom seems both pedestrian and predestined. Born in 1996, he grew up in Kingston upon Thames, a smart suburb of London. He is the eldest of four boys. Mum and Dad are, Holland says, “very creative people”. His father Dominic is a comedian and his mother Nikki a photographer. Perhaps she should have been a talent agent. After noticing Tom had natural rhythm as a child — he was obsessed with a Janet Jackson song — she signed him up to a street-dance class. Those classes led him to performing at an at annual dance show at White Lodge, a ballet school in nearby Richmond Park. The headmaster there pulled Holland’s teacher aside and told her he should audition for the West End musical adaptation of Stephen Daldry’s 2000 coming-of-age drama Billy Elliot.
“One of the reasons I’ve always had such a healthy relationship with my career,” Holland posits halfway through this story, “is that it was never really something I was looking for.” His granny took him to that “pretty savage” audition, which does indeed sound like a stage-school Hunger Games. At the try-outs, there were around 100 children, who were asked to leave the room once their names were read out. Holland was the last one standing. More auditions followed. Four boys took part in a six-week training programme. Only two of them got through to the show. Initially Holland played Michael, the lead character’s best friend, before he was promoted to the title character. You can find clips of Holland’s performance on YouTube — watch him tapping on stage in a tutu! — and there is both an ease and tension to his movement. It is obvious that this person is supposed to be in front of an audience.
Holland’s time in the musical ended in 2010, when he was 13. Adjusting to normal life — he completed his GCSEs at Wimbledon College before enrolling at the Brit school — was not easy. “When I came back to school and the kids were disrespecting the teacher or ignoring what they wanted us to do, I found it very difficult to be in that environment, because I’d been in one where it was like, ‘Shut the fuck up, do as you’re told, and do it again.’” It’s likely that Billy Elliot training camp — intensive, disciplined — was a more helpful education anyway.
Matt Healy
Jacket, £1,895, Polo Ralph Lauren. Trousers, £375, Studio Nicholson. Vest, stylist’s own
Recently Holland was in his kitchen by himself and decided to see if he could still perform the “Angry Dance” sequence from the show. It’s the finale to the first act, when young Billy is raging against his family and small-town views. Holland wanted to commit fully: he performed that show 176 times and the choreography is “ingrained in [me] forever”. But memory is one thing. A 30-year-old’s body is another.
“I couldn’t walk for, like, two days afterwards,” he says, the memory of an ache still present in his grimace. “I was in absolute agony.” Holland’s first film role was 2012’s The Impossible, which tells the story of an English family on holiday in Thailand during the devastating 2004 tsunami (it is based on the real-life experiences of a family from Spain). It’s a handsome, inventively shot film from director JA Bayona in which Holland, playing a 12-year-old called Lucas, holds his own against Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor as his parents. “In the auditions for Lucas in The Impossible, we saw thousands of children, but from the very first self-tape we saw, Tom Holland had a very special humanity,” Bayona tells me. “He had no fear of showing vulnerability, and an instinctive ability to empathise with the story and be moved by the suffering of others.”
After The Impossible, Holland had a few roles: in apocalyptic romance How I Live Now and the television adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. It’s fair to say that Spider-Man changed everything. Even if the West End auditions had prepared Holland for the cut-throat nature of the industry, this time the selection process was played out, as he points out, on “the world stage”. After Garfield vacated the role in 2014, there were negotiations between Sony (which owns the film rights to Spider-Man) and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which owns the rights to pretty much everything else) to include Spider-Man in the MCU. That way, Spidey could star in other Marvel films. Good news for fans clamouring for cross-over events. Great news for producers clamouring for more ticket sales.
At the penultimate audition stage, the list of potential Spideys, including Timothée Chalamet and Asa Butterfield, was leaked. Two contenders weren’t listed, Holland says, and he won’t name them today. “It was tough,” he recalls. “It was really difficult, feeling like you’re walking down the street and everyone is like, ‘I really hope you don’t get this job.’” If there were any misgivings over casting — and I suspect most of these were from Holland himself — these lessened after his first outing in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War and evaporated altogether in 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Matt Healy
Jacket, £2,600; grey top, £1,290; black top, £1,290; shorts, £1,010, all Prada.
Matt Healy
The first standalone outing of Holland’s Spider-Man is a blessedly self-contained venture, with a neat twist involving Parker’s schoolboy crush Liz Allan (Laura Harrier) and the movie’s bad guy Vulture (Michael Keaton). Critics singled out Holland’s boyish energy (thank you, baby face) and gymnastic flair (thank you, Billy Elliot ). Today Holland is a British actor known to Hollywood, with 60 million Instagram followers and, even rarer in today’s landscape, a bankable screen presence. “It felt like my university experience,” he says of making those first films. “That period of your life where you’re leaving home for the first time, you’re making new friends, you’re all getting really close in a really, really short amount of time.”
How do you measure the success of a movie? Billions at the box office? Cinemagoers dressing up in character at screenings? For Holland, Spider-Man: Homecoming resulted in something more personal: a relationship with his co-star Zendaya, who plays classmate Michelle Jones-Watson, later revealed as MJ, traditionally the long-time love interest of Peter Parker. Even with that on-screen parallel, the pair did a pretty good job of keeping a low profile for a few years until paparazzi photos of them together kissing in a car were published in the summer of 2021. Later that year, in September, Holland posted a photo of Zendaya on her 25th birthday with the caption: “My MJ”. There’s little movie-star reticence to mentioning his relationship today: Holland brings her up before I do, and refers to her as “Zee” (I do not do this).
“Our business can present very stressful situations and it’s really nice to have a bedrock of a relationship that will stand the test of time,” Holland says. “We can support each other in ways that only we can, because only we understand really what it’s like to live this life, and I think that is such a luxury, because I just don’t understand how I would be able to have anything like that with anyone else. So, for me, I found my person. She’s my best friend, and I’m the happiest I ever have been when I’m with her, but I also have never felt so supported and safe, ever. Period. Maybe when I was young with my parents and my dad was picking me up from school. Not to say that our relationship is like my mum and dad.”
At the start of 2025, Zendaya walked the red carpet at the Golden Globes wearing what appeared to be an engagement ring. The internet promptly did what the internet does on such occasions: melted down. Then the internet did something slightly stranger. After rumours that their wedding had taken place earlier this year — thanks to a red-carpet comment from Zendaya’s stylist Law Roach — photos circulated from the ceremony. Zendaya is wearing a lace veil, Holland is popping a bottle of Moët. They appear to be at Lake Como. The photos amassed more than 10 million likes. It looks like a gorgeous day.
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Except, the images were AI-generated. Holland saw the funny side of it, though his granny thought she hadn’t been invited. We have a conversation about AI for a little while — about how scary it is, about how eerily realistic images can be — before I ask whether he had to send out messages to any other family members. There’s a long pause (six seconds, to be exact) before Holland replies: “No, because they were all there.”
I tell him that I did not realise that the wedding had happened already. “That’s all you’ll get on that,” he says. It’s the firmest Holland has been so far in our conversation, and so we move on.
Actually, we go back to the start, just quickly. What were Holland’s first impressions of Zendaya? “Obviously, I was super excited at the prospect of working with her and getting to know her,” he says. “She smashed her audition out the park and got the part before she’d even left the room. I remember when she closed the door to leave, [producer] Amy Pascal was immediately like, ‘Well, she’s getting the job.’”
Holland turned 30 at the start of June. When we speak, he believes that he will be doing press on the actual day. He is four years sober after challenging himself to a Dry January in 2022 and not turning back; today he’s wearing a cap branded with his alcohol-free-beer company Bero. In 2024, he set up a production company called Billy17 with his brother Harry. There’s the whole marriage thing. He still lives in Kingston and walks his dogs every day in Richmond Park. He remains close to his family. He plays darts and watches Formula 1 with his mates. He’s really into The Traitors. A very recognisable kind of life. Some might call it settled.
But he is excitable in a way that one cannot purely attribute to the sunny weather or finishing a long-term project. When conversation shifts to work, he is especially determined. In July, he will be starring in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. He’s playing Telemachus, the son of the long-lost Odysseus (Matt Damon) and Penelope (Anne Hathaway). Quite the on-screen lineage, and Holland is suitably awed. (He often seems awed.) He describes staying late one day and watching a scene between the two actors. The film was shot on Imax, which means that the camera could only run for three minutes before reloading. The scene, he estimates, was around nine minutes, requiring the actors to stop, wait for five minutes and pick it back up. “I was completely flabbergasted at their level of focus, their level of discipline, their understanding that what the crew is doing is also incredibly difficult,” he says. “For me as a young actor, to see two people as established as they are, continuing to exercise those skills, was really cool.”
It is intriguing to hear Holland describe himself as a young actor. Yes, he is 30 — and could certainly play younger if he so wished — but there’s a very obvious self-assurance. Certainly others see that, too. Hathaway tells me, over email, that Holland is “made of the sort of stuff you can’t teach”. “He is really one-of-one,” she says. “His ability to be an artist through and through, as well as a legit and successful businessman who sees the whole field and keeps both in appropriate conversation with each other at the level he does? Extremely rare.”
That bodes well for Holland’s next big role: as Hollywood Golden Age actor and dancer extraordinaire Fred Astaire. “If you ask anyone that is younger than my brother, they have no idea who Fred Astaire is,” he says, “so there is a nervousness in the idea of making that movie — how commercial is a movie to tell the story of someone that younger generations have no idea who they are?” Holland is viewing it as an opportunity to educate more youthful audiences. “Fred was incredibly keen to never cut the camera,” Holland notes, “so when you watch his films and you see his dancing, it very rarely cuts. It’s always like one continuous take.”
Astaire is a very obvious next step for an actor with roots in dance. That film – a biopic of a Hollywood legend – would also be one of the more Oscar-baiting projects in his career. In a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he said he had a 15-year-old goal to win an Academy Award. There are six years left, if he still has plans for a shiny gold man. He’d like – “it is truly a vote of our community”, he says – but adds he’s not reading scripts with that in mind. He points to Leonardo DiCaprio, shunned by the Academy when he was a fresh-faced lead in Nineties blockbusters and only awarded the honour in 2016 for The Revenant. “I think there’s something quite poetic about him winning it later in his career ‘cause I’m sure that felt so special to him,” Holland says. “So I’m in no rush, but there is still obviously ambition and desire to one day stand up there and thank my mum.”
There are a few essential myths in the making of Tom Holland, but only one of them involves fishnets. In 2017, to promote Spider-Man: Homecoming, Holland appeared on an episode of the TV show Lip Sync Battle alongside Zendaya. The format is simple: two famous people go head-to-head, lip syncing famous songs. Zendaya plumped for Bruno Mars’s “24K Magic”. Holland, meanwhile, performed Rihanna’s “Umbrella”. Here is how that went: Holland, very gentlemanly, dances on stage to “Singin’ in the Rain” before Rihanna’s 2007 megahit starts and Holland — with theatrical flair — reappears from behind a wall of umbrellas in latex shorts, a halter neck and, yes, fishnets. The video has more than 170 million views on YouTube, though if you added in how many times it has been clipped for social-media platforms, surely that would at least double.
You could read — and many people have — all sorts into this performance. He’s a modern actor who’s unafraid to do something silly, so comfortable in his masculinity that he’ll dress like a stripper. In those two and a half minutes, a new type of leading man emerged. All that can be true, but it misses an essential truth: Holland knows how to entertain.
“I did that Lip Sync Battle show when I was 20 or 21 and I didn’t think twice about it,” he says. “But now, as someone who’s had a little bit more experience in the public eye and has lived a life of fame for the last decade, I would really overanalyse doing something like that. I just think, as you get older, you get a little bit more cynical. The downsides of something might be a little bit more obvious than the upsides of something.”
Holland clearly has this on his mind, especially as he gears up to what might be the busiest promotional cycle of his life. “We live in a time where you can accidentally say the wrong thing, or someone can twist your words and you have to explain yourself,” he says. “And it’s just about managing those feelings and being prepared. Before, in press tours, I was like, ‘What could go wrong? Like, I’m just a lad from London and I’m excited to be here.’”
He’s not entirely wrong to be mistrustful. See: the AI-generated images of his nuptials. And last year, tabloids including The Sun reported that Holland was taken to hospital while on the set of the new Spider-Man film. “Please don’t take offence at this, but when you read those articles about something that happened to you, it’s such a good way to understand that you really can’t trust what you read in the press,” Holland says. According to reports, the incident took place at Leavesden Studio (it was Pinewood) and a woman was also injured and taken to hospital (that didn’t happen). Nor was it true that Holland himself was rushed to hospital in an ambulance. He did suffer a mishap, but actually tried to stay at work, and only towards the end of the day was he driven — “gingerly” — to hospital.
Holland is able to laugh about it now, but it might account for the occasional caution in his answers: I can almost hear his mind whirring to work out how his response might be interpreted outside this room.
Matt Healy
Blouson, £3,850, Giorgio Armani. Vest, stylist’s own. Necklace, Holland’s own
When I read over my transcript of this interview, the conversation is remarkably cyclical. We go between work and life, returning to the same projects and ideas, offering up new perspectives. As the person asking the questions, I bear some responsibility in that but Holland — between decades and career chapters — is clearly in a reflective mood.
For example, he talks about finding a way to stay involved with Spider-Man whenever his tenure ends: he’d love to be a producer but it’s “pretty tough to get a producing credit on future movies”. And he’s thinking about the next generation. “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. In interviews, Holland frequently credits Downey Jr, who plays Iron Man, as a guide through the audition and early filming process. On screen, Iron Man is something of a father figure to the young Peter Parker as well.
Who does he think would make a good successor? “Owen Cooper would be awesome,” he says, of the 16-year-old Warrington-born star of the recent hit mini-series Adolescence. “Obviously he’s super-talented and the talk of the town right now.” Holland also thinks it could be a great springboard for a fresh face.
Matt Healy
Jacket, £1,990; hoodie, £590; trousers, £1,100, all McQueen. Socks, £17, Pantherella; Loafers, £200, Bobbies
This is a cliché of celebrity profiles but by the end of our time together, my overwhelming feeling is: that was a fun hang. Maybe that is precisely the point. As Hathaway later tells me: “He reminds me of the first generation of movie stars who were all a combination of pro-athletes, vaudeville performers, stunt people and wildly hopeful creatives; who also had that magic thing where you can imagine being best friends if only you were lucky enough to meet and have a beer with them. Or, in Tom and my case, a Bero.”
A reminder that this is not a hang? That he is indeed a movie star? A five-minute warning from an assistant that Holland soon has to prepare for shooting. A text from a publicist, while we’re speaking, that he has a hard out. There’s a movie to finish. Soon Holland will be back on multiplex screens. He will be touring the world to promote the summer’s two biggest films.
As we finish, I ask what he would like the next decade of his life to look like. I suspect I already know the answer. “Probably,” he says, taking the smallest of beats, “something that’s very similar to the last 10 years, to be honest.” ○
Photographs by Matt Healy
Styling by Crystalle Cox
Grooming by Rachael Speke using Davines hair care and Oskia skincare
Set Design by Julia Dias
Tailor: Nancy Schmidt
Movement Director: Liam John at Dust Bunnies Agency
Styling assistant: Ashley Hubbard
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