Tom Holland’s New Superpower

IT’S ALMOST 80 DEGREES ON an October Monday in New York City, but the New Yorkers drifting in and out of a lounge at the Greenwich Hotel are committed to their fall aesthetics. The hotel, too, is resigned to an autumn gestalt: Thanks to a roaring fire in a monumental hunting-lodge hearth, the dimly lit lounge is also 80 degrees.

Tom Holland sits in a striped silk armchair near the fireplace. He is wearing white On running shoes, wide-leg trousers, and an ivory sweatshirt that he quickly peels off, issuing a muffled apology from within the fabric as his T-shirt rises with it. Liberated, he sits back in the chair. Behind him are shelves of ancient books and a taxidermied antelope head. He is lit from the right by the fire and a lamp with a red shade so large it achieves personhood, and every divot in his face, especially the cleft in his chin, is deeply shadowed. He looks primed for a live reading of one of the tomes behind him, an impression helped along by his English accent, which is un-posh and friendly—more Harry Potter than Prince William.

“My accent annoys my parents,” he says. “They are quite well spoken, and I like to think I exist in a world that’s just below well spoken.” His brother Harry’s accent, he adds, is “much worse” than his. “E fuckeen thinks he’s, like, from the East End? And it drives my parents nuts.”

I am studying Holland for signs of unusual rizz, a.k.a. charisma. “Tom is the ultimate rizz master,” Timothée Chalamet recently said in an interview for LADbible TV. “The Internet knows this. Zendaya knows this. Everyone knows this.” It’s true that the Internet erupts with commentary whenever Holland steps out, particularly if he steps out with Zendaya, the megastar he has been dating for a few years. But I’m having trouble articulating the magnetism. “It’s kind of, like, an intangible thing,” says Spider-Man director Jon Watts. “You look at him and you just love him.”

To be clear, I see that the 28-year-old actor has the obvious prerequisites for rizz: He is charming and intelligent and confident. I have also seen his 2017 Lip Sync Battle performance, in which, to Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” he dances energetically in a corset and tight leather shorts and ends with a front flip, landing on his back on a flooded stage. I understand that he, like Spider-Man’s alter ego, Peter Parker, has hidden capabilities that are perhaps infinite. But sequestered in the corner of the hotel lounge, he gives me the impression not of suavity but of intense sincerity.

Perhaps that’s because he’s not here to promote a film. In fact, he is emerging from a yearlong break from acting. “It was just something I needed to do,” he explains. “I had been acting flat out since I was 11.” That was when he auditioned for Billy Elliot: The Musical in London. A few years after Billy Elliot, he was cast in The Impossible, opposite Naomi Watts, and then as Spider-Man in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. He’s since played Spider-Man in two Avengers films and in three stand-alone Spider-Man movies, with a fourth on the way, all the while taking on white-knuckle films like Cherry—in which his character is walloped first by love, then by combat, addiction, and bank robbery—and The Crowded Room, a psychological thriller in which he plays a young man at the center of a disturbing crime. In addition to the fourth Spider-Man film, he’ll join Matt Damon and Zendaya in a Christopher Nolan movie slated for 2026.

His sabbatical was a page break before a new chapter, one in which he is better positioned to both continue his rapid ascent in Hollywood and enjoy the life it has bought him. He fills his house in London with friends and family. He does carpentry, and he golfs habitually and very well (his handicap is 2.9): He and his two brothers recently played in a tournament with English professional golfer Tommy Fleetwood and won. “It was the best day of my life. I called my lady and was like, ‘Listen, I’m thinking of turning pro,’” he jokes. He and Zendaya share a dog, Noon, and recently got another, a Doberman named Daphne. “She’s so cute, man, it’s actually a joke,” he says, holding up his phone to show a photo of a guilty-looking puppy. “This is her in trouble because she just pooed in my house.” (The rizz overfloweth.) Holland doesn’t have the schmoozy charisma we’ve come to expect from our superheroes. What he has is much harder to fake.

HOLLAND’S SINCERITY PERSISTS even when he’s discussing his new line of nonalcoholic beers, Bero, which he is currently promoting; after we meet, he’ll head to an event where he’ll pitch the beers to scores of bartenders. At this point, in the celebrity arms race for products, a trend for which Danny DeVito does not receive enough credit (before Casamigos, there was DeVito’s Premium Limoncello), we have all witnessed actors suddenly turning robotic when discussing their new brands, but Holland becomes more animated when he talks about Bero. It is personal for him, he explains.

In January 2022, he decided to take a one-month break from alcohol, and during that month he realized how tightly woven into his social life drinking was. “Every Friday after work was a write-off: Let’s get drunk and have a good time. I didn’t have bad experiences, but I would drink enough so that I would ruin my next day,” he says—enough, he has said, that he had an enlightening conversation with his doctor about his liver. He often craved alcohol at social events, and he found his first month of sobriety unsettlingly difficult. He recalls one time when he drove one of his brothers to a poker night. Midway through the event, Holland asked his brother if he could drive them home instead; he felt as if he needed a drink to enjoy himself. His brother was surprised. “It was a bit of an eye-opening moment for me and for him,” Holland says. “It’s really helpful when the people closest to you start going, ‘Are you sure?’” He decided to push himself through a second month, then a third, then six months.

He began to see positives. He loved waking up early to go golfing on Saturday mornings—previously a dead zone, Friday nights being what they were. He also found that he could better navigate stressful situations. For instance: A few months into his sobriety, in May 2022, he was working on The Crowded Room alongside Amanda Seyfried and Emmy Rossum. “There was quite a lot of animosity on that set. It was not a very harmonious place, and there was a lot of arguing and butting heads,” he says, noting that these disagreements were not creative debates, which he welcomes even when they’re heated. The project was a trial by fire for a newly sober actor. “I thought, If I start drinking again now, with all this going on, it’s gonna get worse, right?”

He adjusted to sobriety without formal treatment. “I’m quite strong-willed. When I decide to do something, I’m really gonna do it,” he says. “I leaned on close ones a lot: family, friends, old colleagues, new colleagues, people that reached out that I didn’t know who also were sober.” He actually had a formative conversation in this same chair, next to this same antelope, early on in his sobriety. He was having a rough week and longed for a drink. His lawyer came to the hotel to talk with him. “He gave me a really poignant piece of advice that helped me get through everything, which was: You’ll never wake up the morning after a night out and wish you had a drink. That piece of advice really rang true to me, because my problem was that I would have one drink and be fine, and then I would just go too far.”

After six months alcohol-free, he considered bursting from the cocoon of sobriety with a blowout 26th-birthday party, but by then he didn’t even want to. Now, more than two years sober, he has emerged as a champion of sober living—an avatar for a broad swath of young adults who have stopped or limited their drinking.

“You see all the headlines suggesting that it’s the Gen Z 20-year-old that isn’t drinking anymore,” says John Herman, who has been working with Holland for a year as Bero’s CEO. “And that’s true to a point.” (Recent research from Gallup shows that the percentage of Americans under 35 who say they drink has dropped to 59 percent, down from 72 percent in the early 2000s.) “But if you look at this past Dry January, about [30] percent of people in the age range of 35 to 54 participated, and that’s massive. There is this consumer moment that is still in the early innings, but it is so far beyond where it was five years ago. You just don’t have to fight upstream.”

Nonalcoholic beers were very useful to Holland during his first year of sobriety. “My boys? Big drinkers. Golf. Pubs. Lads’ holidays. And not one of them ever chastised me for not having a drink at the bar,” he says. But he still wanted to feel more included at bars, and he was underwhelmed by the available options. He was adamant that Bero be appropriately foamy, for instance. “A lot of these nonalc beers, you pour them out into a glass, and you get these kind of gross bubbles at the top, like a pint of apple juice,” he says. Early iterations of Bero, he adds, were sometimes too foamy. “They would ship them to London in the sample stage, and I’m like”—he mimes an explosion with his hands—“blowing up my kitchen.”

The final result has a satisfactory foam and comes in three variations, the names of which are cozy, like the names of J.Crew sweaters: Kingston Golden Pils, Edge Hill Hazy IPA, and Noon Wheat, after his and Zendaya’s dog. A stout is in the works. Holland is aware that launching Bero has added pressure to his sobriety—a cocktail could result in a tabloid headline—but he feels the attention will help him to stay on track. “You can’t sing this song and then not walk the walk,” he says. “I think part of me, when I announced it, I almost felt vindicated or relieved.”

There is nothing studied about how Holland discusses his sobriety: He doesn’t sensationalize his difficulties, and he is matter-of-fact about his successes. Herman says he was stunned by how self-possessed Holland was in the face of his stardom. “At his core, he’s just a normal guy that is really close with friends and family.” One has the sense, listening to Holland talk about his sobriety, that however tectonic the change has been for him, it is just one in a long line of dramatic transformations.

ACTORS ARE OFTEN required to change their bodies for roles, especially in the superheroverse. This is true even when the hero you’re playing is meant to be a bit slight. Over the past decade, Holland has had to swing between peak fitness and tormented desiccation as he’s juggled Spider-Man appearances with projects like Cherry and The Crowded Room. On a normal day, he eats just one meal—he batch-cooks vats of chili con carne or something similar at home—but when dropping weight for The Crowded Room in particular, he restricted himself even further, a process he calls “extremely painful.”

He prefers bulking up for roles, and he’s currently trying to put on weight for his upcoming projects, though his Spartan meal preferences present a challenge. “I really have to think about eating three times a day. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner to me is an extortionate amount of food.”

But Holland has been honing his physique for roles since he was tapped for Billy Elliot, which premiered at Victoria Palace Theatre in London in 2005. The headmaster of White Lodge, the Royal Ballet School, had spotted Holland during a performance of his street dance club. The actor trained in dance and acrobatics for over two years before he took the stage as Billy. “The show was incredibly taxing on the body. I couldn’t do it now. Eleven-year-old me would annihilate me now in a fitness race,” he says. When he returned to school after the show, he was stunned to find that he was much faster than all his classmates. Fitness, he realized then, was something he was good at.

His penchant for acrobatics helped him later, when he was auditioning to play Spider-Man. “He just was so young and sweet, and just charming, and then in the audition, he did a full backflip, like a standing backflip, in addition to being really great on tape,” recalls Watts, who directed Holland in the first three Spider-Man films. “It was like watching a video of the real Peter Parker.”

“Tom is somebody who cares a lot about other people. He has a sense of responsibility and duty,” says director Joe Russo, who, along with his brother Anthony Russo, directed Holland in Captain America: Civil War, his Spider-Man debut, and then later in Cherry. At the time, Russo says, they were meeting “every kid under every rock in every country” to try to find the next Spider-Man. One day, casting director Sarah Finn called to say she’d found their guy. “He was all the things that reminded me of what I loved about Peter Parker as a kid,” Russo recalls. “And he was a movie star. He had that movie-star quality. The charisma, the confidence, the energy.” Russo also remembers being wowed by Holland’s entrance: “He entered the scene at one of the auditions by doing a flip!” (Take note, young actors: Old-fashioned razzle-dazzle doesn’t hurt.)

There were many physical challenges to come. For the third Spider-Man film, No Way Home, for which Holland says he was the fittest he’s been since he was 11, he worked with Duffy Gaver, a modern-day Philoctetes renowned for training on-screen heroes—from Brad Pitt, ahead of Troy, to Chris Hemsworth, for Thor. Holland appreciates Gaver’s rackside manner. The actor does not respond well to militaristic “drop and give me 20”–style encouragement, he explains, and he liked that when Gaver gave him a daunting workout at 5:00 a.m. on a Monday ahead of a 12-hour workday, he would say, “Just see how far you get.” (Holland always finished the workouts.)

That doesn’t mean Gaver went easy on him. Before No Way Home, Holland and a friend he was training with did daily HIIT workouts. “We got into crazy shape. We were so fit,” he says. “A Monday morning would be this hour-long workout: one pullup, two dips, three pushups, four sit-ups, five squats—that’s round one—and you basically go all the way up to 10, so the last round is 10, 20, 30, 40, 50. And then you’ll go all the way back down to 1. That is a monster workout.”

It worked. A behind-the-scenes clip has circulated online showing Holland shooting stunts as Spider-Man. He races through parked cars in a lot, hitting every mark, and leaps off a springboard into a front flip with stunning energy and precision. “Peter Parkour,” one commenter quipped.

Holland has begun to suspect, as he approaches 30, that he will not be able to do flips forever. Recently, he was in Cornwall, on the southern English coast, with Zendaya and his family, when one of his young cousins asked him whether he could do a backflip. Holland said he could, and his cousin asked him to demonstrate. “So I went outside and I was getting ready, and I was thinking, I can do this. I can totally do this. I’ve done this thousands of times. And Z was there, and she was like, ‘Are you sure you can still do this?’” He reassured her, bent down, and launched himself. “I actually did land it, but I pulled every muscle in my stomach, because when you do a backflip, it’s all about extending up as much as you can and then tucking. For weeks, I could not laugh because my stomach was so sore.” Stars—they pull every muscle in their bodies trying to impress children, just like us.

AS OUR INTERVIEW nears its end, Holland’s eyes flit to the doorway of the lounge repeatedly. Word has spread that he’s here, and more and more guests wander in, side-eyeing him while pretending to admire the space. A woman sits down on a love seat nearby, her back to us but a tension in her shoulders suggesting she is listening. At one point, Holland suddenly stops speaking mid-sentence. He contorts himself, shrinking down into the depths of the armchair until his top half is nearly horizontal. “That lady is taking a picture,” he says, grimacing, then straightens up. I turn around and see a middle-aged woman, neck extended as she looks imperiously down at her phone over her glasses. She pokes at her screen, not realizing she’s been spotted.

He embraces the attention from his fans but acknowledges that it can sometimes be limiting: He cannot easily go to a play at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, for instance. “It’s booked in advance, we sort it all out, we call ahead to the theater and make sure we can get somewhere private,” he says in a yada yada yada tone. Besides the prospect of being swarmed by fans, he is sensitive to the fact that his being at a theater could draw attention from the actors. He uses this as an excuse to avoid most nonmandatory public events, with the exception of Zendaya’s premieres, though he adds that he doesn’t typically walk the carpet with her—“because it’s not my moment, it’s her moment, and if we go together, it’s about us.”

He does go to the grocery store, though that can be fraught for other reasons: He was recently in a Whole Foods in Los Angeles when a fight, unrelated to him, broke out between two men. “They’re like going at it, right behind me,” he recalls. He jumped into the fray and grabbed one of the men, leading him away. “I can see that he’s recognized me immediately, and you could see the wheels turning, like, I’m really angry, but Spider-Man is telling me to calm down,” he says, laughing. “So, yeah, I go to the supermarket.”

Holland has said that he’s always looking for ways to remove himself from acting, to more easily lead a normal life. When I ask him whether Bero is an off-ramp—a step toward ejecting himself from Hollywood—he clarifies that it is a passion project; for now, he is glad to be Spider-Man.

A normal life is far off for Holland. Although, he says cheerfully, “When I have kids, you will not see me in movies anymore.” He will golf, and he will be a dad. “Golf and dad. And I will just disappear off the face of the earth.”

But repeatedly during our time together, I’ve been struck by how normal he already is: He could easily have been England’s most insufferable former child star, his personality curdled by too-easy fame, but instead, he’s startlingly well adjusted, not just for a young celebrity but for any 28-year-old. Just as Peter Parker often seems awed by his capabilities, Holland still seems awed by his career. When I ask Jon Watts to describe the most Tom Holland thing he’s ever seen Tom Holland do, he answers immediately: “His expression at the end of the dance he did, to ‘Umbrella,’ where he’s like, ‘Oh, you didn’t think I could do that, did you?’ He’s exhausted and can’t believe he just got through it perfectly, and he’s just so happy, and so proud. I love it.”

The man in that video obviously has rizz. But he doesn’t just have rizz. “The thing that impresses me the most,” says Russo of Holland, “is that he has become an international movie star from the time we met him until now. He is hounded by the press. He’s in a very high-profile relationship. And he has remained exactly the same through all of it. Completely genuine, completely earnest, and as lovable as he was the day he first walked into our office for his first audition.”

It would be an oversimplification to say Holland has an “everyman appeal.” He is an everyman who, through determination and commitment—the “strong will” that has kept him sober—landed in extraordinary circumstances. And much like Peter Parker, it hasn’t changed him a bit.

LIGHTNING ROUND

Frenemy exercise?
Bulgarian split squats.

Workout anthem?
The new Linkin Park track “The Emptiness Machine.”

What’s your favorite Movie?
I take no shame in saying Avatar.

Last book you read?
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin.

Last time you cried?
My granddad’s funeral was a few weeks ago. Happy tears. He lived a fantastic life and was a great grandfather and taught me carpentry.

What’s the last thing you made?
Some cupboards at our house in L.A. They’re still standing.

Meal you make to wow a partner?
Recently I’ve been doing this really nice lentil chili, basically a chili con carne but with lentils.

Euphemism for sex?
That’s my lady; I’m not getting into that!

Fashion Director: Ted Stafford
Stylist: Crystalle Cox
Assistant Stylist: Imani Granger
Grooming: Amy Komorowski/The Wall Group
Set Designer: Michael Sturgeon/Monday Artists
Tailoring: Darlene Deandrade
Production: Dana Brockman/Viewfinders
Executive Producer/Director: Dorenna Newton
DP/Editor: Elyssa Aquino
Cam Op: Robert Mroczko
AP: Janie Booth

This story appears in the January/February 2025 issue of Men’s Health.

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