Tom Holland on his failed ‘Star Wars’ audition: “I just couldn’t stop laughing”
Tom Holland, the face of Marvel’s latest Spider-Man franchise, has generated nearly $4billion at the box office, swinging high above New York skyscrapers in his red and blue lycra. But in a what-could-have-been moment, Holland almost crossed over to another iconic universe, one filled with starfighters, lightsabers and Wookiees.
The British actor had initially tried out for a role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens — and let’s just say it was far from a Hollywood fairytale ending. Before his spectacular ascent as Peter Parker, Holland had graced the audition room for the Star Wars sequel, and what transpired was nothing short of comedic gold.
“I remember doing this scene with this lady, bless her, and she was just a drone,” Holland recalls. He painted a vivid picture: a straight-faced Holland uttering lines like, “We gotta get back to the ship!” while his co-actor mimicked droid sounds, declaring, “Bleep, bloop bloop, bleep bloop.” Eventually, the situation devolved into uncontrollable laughter from the young actor.
“I just couldn’t stop laughing. I found it so funny,” Holland says when recounting this story on the YouTube show Hot Ones, a platform infamous for extracting out-of-the-box stories from celebrities while setting their mouths on fire with increasingly spicy levels of hot sauce. “I felt bad for laughing through my audition but couldn’t contain my laughter when working alongside a woman making robot sounds,” he added.
While we laugh at Holland’s misadventure, the role he was vying for eventually went to John Boyega, who took on the character Finn and became a defining face of Disney’s new Star Wars. Holland, however, had to wait a while for his meteoric rise, which kicked off with his appearance in Captain America: Civil War in 2016 and set him on the path to being the best Spider-Man ever. But it’s intriguing to wonder: Had he not been in fits of laughter during that Force Awakens audition, would he have been confined to a galaxy far away and never become our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man?
In hindsight, Holland regards that audition as a categorical “bad audition” moment in his then-fledgling career. Nowadays, of course, Holland doesn’t need to audition much. He’s pegged to be one of the leading Avengers in upcoming epics such as Avengers: The King Dynasty and Avengers: Secret War. Meanwhile, Boyega, free from the Star Wars universe, has gone on to other projects like The Woman King and Netflix’s They Cloned Tyrone.
So, while his laughter may have cost him a trip on the Millennium Falcon, it likely secured Holland’s flight path to becoming an Avenger, the spider-webbed centrepiece in Marvel’s multibillion-dollar tapestry. After the cinematic spectacular event of Avengers: Endgame, the Marvel universe was widely criticised for staleness with its subsequent Disney+ spin-off shows and lacklustre ‘Phase 4’ films. Except, of course, for the fantastic Spider-Man: No Way Home, which many saw as the highlight of post-Endgame Marvel – and for that, we have Holland’s charismatic performance to thank.
