The 2019 movie that made Tom Holland’s dream a reality: “Everything I wanted to accomplish”
Playing Peter Parker was only part of Tom Holland’s Hollywood dream.
There couldn’t have been more pressure on him when he was cast as Parker in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not only did he have to get audiences around the world re-engaged in the character after both Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire’s franchises petered out in quality, but he had to fit within the structure of the existing MCU.
After his scene-stealing debut in Captain America: Civil War, Holland delivered the most authentic depiction of Stan Lee’s original vision for the character in Spider-Man: Homecoming, the first standalone Spider-Man film that actually felt like a high school comedy.
Although he has owned the role of Spider-Man in a way that will make it difficult for anyone to take it over, he’s also expressed ambitions as an actor that go beyond being in Marvel films for the rest of his career.
After his experiences working with Christopher Nolan on The Odyssey, Holland was inspired to think more critically about his next solo MCU film and insisted on attaining a higher degree of quality for Spider-Man: Brand New Day. It might be easy to make fun of the actor’s career, given that most of it has centred on one role, but his solo Spider-Man films are among the best in the MCU, and a step above a majority of the Hollywood blockbusters that are churned out each summer.
Even if the Marvel films tend to stick to certain formulas, they have given Holland valuable acting experiences, especially since they frequently attract such notable A-list talent, such as Spider-Man: Far From Home, the first MCU film released after Avengers: Endgame, which explored how Peter dealt with the death of his mentor, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr). The film’s main antagonist, Quentin Beck, was played by Jake Gyllenhaal, and Marvel producer Kevin Feige said that getting the Oscar-nominated actor involved had been a dream for Holland.
“We really wanted to work with Jake for years and as often happens in the MCU, the perfect thing comes along at the perfect time and the perfect actor steps into the role and that’s what happened,” Feige said. “We also knew Tom was a big fan of Jake and after we cast him.”
Feige said that Holland had discussed working with Gyllenhaal back when he was working on his first Marvel film, recalling, “Maybe on the first or second day of shooting, Tom Holland came up to me and said, ‘You know, last year I wrote sort of a wish list of everything I wanted to accomplish’… And the first name he wrote on ‘Who I want to work with’, and he showed it to me, Jake Gyllenhaal, and he didn’t tell us that until after they had already started working together.”
The irony is that Gyllenhaal’s involvement with the Spider-Man franchise had been long in the works. After Maguire suffered a serious back injury while making the original film, Sony Pictures briefly reconsidered recasting him with Gyllenhaal in Spider-Man 2. While this didn’t materialise at the time, he did get the honour of being the first actor to play the live-action version of the Spider-Man character Mysterio, who has certainly been one of the best MCU villains.
