“Wow, that’s a bad review”: Tom Holland’s most difficult performance gave him a “kick in the teeth”
On the surface, Tom Holland seems to have it all.
He’s (reportedly) married to global superstar Zendaya, with whom he stars in Marvel’s Spider-Man films, and he possesses the kind of charming British accent that audiences around the world seem to adore.
But his industry is a famously unkind one, and he’s been in it for much longer than other actors his age – Holland broke out onto the scene in 2012 with a critically acclaimed performance in The Impossible, which dramatised the true story of a family torn apart in the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
Holland’s performance of Lucas, the eldest son in a family parented by Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor, is the beating heart of the film, expertly mixing poignance with pain with skill beyond his years, but at the time, Holland didn’t know that the great reception would come back to haunt him.
Some 11 years on from The Impossible, Holland starred in the Apple TV mini-series, The Crowded Room. This time, the Kingston upon Thames native was challenged with a much darker role: he starred as series lead, Danny Sullivan, a man arrested for his involvement in a shooting in 1979.
Holland, again, is the beating heart of the project, which was based on Daniel Keyes’ 1981 novel The Minds of Billy Milligan and also starred household name Amanda Seyfried, as well as Emmy Rossum and Sasha Lane. It was, he told The Hollywood Reporter at that time, the “hardest thing I’ve ever done”.
Beyond looking off-putting with a scraggle of long, dark hair, Holland’s Vanilla Sky-esque confusion mounts as he sifts back through his memory to understand how a poor, butt-of-the-joke lad like himself could ever be accused of such a heinous crime.
Critics hated it, mostly because his golden boy golden retriever aura, paired with his sweet but undeniable baby face, means he’s condemned to never being taken seriously. Only 27-years-old at the time, Holland took the critique hard.
“It was a kick in the teeth,” he admitted.
“Rolling over, looking up the reviews, and then all of a sudden I was like, ‘Wow. That’s a bad review.’ Sometimes there’s a redeeming quality in there. There was nothing.”
Tom Holland
Holland shied away from the limelight for a little while after that. No wonder, as he admitted earnestly at the time, “This show absolutely broke me in every way possible. I just kept my head down. I dug my heels in, and I just tried my best.” It appears that the dark psychological themes wormed their way into his own head.
A year after the release of The Crowded Room, Holland tried again to break out of the critical curse that’d somehow befallen him. This time, Holland took to London’s West End in a reproduction of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Again, a lacklustre response: Words like “fine” and “perfectly plausible” seemed to be the best that Holland could land.
Thank God the Spider-Man thing worked out – as British men go, Holland certainly isn’t one of the bad ones.
