Tom Holland (actor)
English actor (born 1996)
Thomas Stanley Holland (born 1 June 1996) is an English actor. Holland achieved international recognition playing Spider-Man in six Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) superhero films, beginning with Captain America: Civil War (2016). The following year, Holland received the BAFTA Rising Star Award and became the youngest actor to play a title role in an MCU film in Spider-Man: Homecoming. His His accolades include a British Academy Film Award and three Saturn Awards. He featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list of 2019. Some publications have called him one of the most popular actors of his generation.
Quotes
edit- I wouldn’t say I particularly have a history of issues with mental health. 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.
- 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.
- I haven’t quite found someone yet that I think I could call ‘my therapist.’ But I think it’s an incredibly honorable profession. I should find someone. I’m going to look further.
- For me, when it comes to looking for the next job, it’s about the message, and that is the same thing for Spider-Man.
- Mental health is a slightly more complicated subject because you can’t see it, and the pain is internal. So, to try and build a platform that has more compassion, that has more sympathy and more understanding to the internal struggles that many people are going through on a daily basis, is a really wonderful thing that I think we’ve achieved with the show, and I’m hoping that the general public will pick up on that message.
- Whenever I break down a character, the first thing I do is I’ll pick out the moments that I relate to with the character. I build on that. That’s how I make a character that is true to myself while representing different things.
- As an actor, your face is your superpower. If you take that away, and put someone in a mask, it’s really difficult to emote. Having done that for maybe eight years has given me a great sense of confidence in my physicality.
- The 20-year goal is to be a film director. The 15-year goal is to win an Oscar. The five-year goal is to just keep enjoying myself. I really am having the time of my life. But as far as my future goes, I want to stretch myself as an actor in a way that Jake Gyllenhaal, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Meryl Streep do. I don’t want to be stuck to one character. I think that’s what can happen when you take on a superhero movie.
- My biggest flaw is probably my attention span or lack thereof. And while it might seem contradictory, my biggest strength is my work ethic.
- I really am a massive fan of making movies, but I really do not like Hollywood. It is not for me. The business really scares me. I understand that I’m a part of that business and I enjoy my kind of interactions with it, but that said, I am always looking for ways to kind of remove myself from it to kind of just live as normal a life as possible.
- I definitely think it has been an ongoing thought, which is ‘don’t lose yourself.’ I’ve seen so many people come before me and lose themselves, and I’ve had friends that I’ve grown up with that aren’t friends of mine anymore because they’ve lost themselves to this business, and I just am really, really keen to focus on what make me happy which is my family, my friends, my carpentry, my golf, the charity my mom runs, that is the stuff that makes me really happy and that is the stuff I should protect.
- Like, you’ll never see me at an award show that I don’t have to be at. I’m never going to a red-carpet event that I’m not in the film of. I don’t want the attention when I don’t need it.
- Things that would go wrong on set that would normally set me off, I could take in my stride. I had such better mental clarity. I felt healthier. I felt fitter and I just sort of said to myself, ‘Why am I enslaved to this drink? Why am I so obsessed by the idea of having this drink?’ It’s honestly been the best thing I’ve ever done.
- I was becoming a problem. I was just obsessed with it, and I was obsessed to find out what people were saying and how people, what they thought about me. So I decided to make an announcement, which we unfortunately have to do, and say I’m taking a break from social media. And I tried to position myself and say I’m taking a break from social media because I feel like my mental health will benefit from it.
- I went through a rough stage in my career where I must have gone to 50 or 60 auditions and did not get a single job. And then my mum packed my bags, sent me to Cardiff in Wales, and I did this carpentry course. So I’m a qualified carpenter in England. I did that for a while and really enjoyed it.
- I didn't one day wake up and say, 'I'm giving up drinking,'. Like many Brits, I had a very, very boozy December. [It was] Christmas time, I was on vacation, I was drinking a lot, and I've always been able to drink a lot. I think I get my genes from my mom's side in that thing — I can drink. And I decided to just give [it] up for January.
- I was really, really struggling and I started to really worry that maybe I had an alcohol problem. So I decided that I would wait until my birthday, which is June 1. I said to myself, 'If I can do six months without alcohol, then I can prove to myself that I don't have a problem.' And by the time I got to June 1, I was the happiest I've ever been in my life.
- I'm no stranger to the physical aspects of the job doing the whole action-movie thing. But the mental aspect, it really beat me up and it took a long time for me to recover afterwards, to sort of get back to reality.
- I hope that people will feel educated about the powers of mental health, the struggles, [and] our incredible abilities to survive.
- If I seek anyone’s approval, it would be my parents. That would be the highest level of achievement.
- "The Charm (and Grit) of Tom Holland" in Esquire (9 February 2021)
- If you were to break up with that person, people will have their own opinions as to why you broke up or whose fault it was. And me being a famous person and having people that love me around the world, if I were to break up with a poor girl, they might think it was her fault. And I wouldn’t want that pressure to be on someone because of me.
- "The Charm (and Grit) of Tom Holland" in Esquire (9 February 2021)
- I’m no stranger to hard work. I’ve lived by the idea that hard work is good work.
