For The Odyssey’s actors, like Pattinson, who plays Antinous, a sleazy suitor of Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, and Tom Holland, playing Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, this meant going up in costume, in sandals. For Nolan, this meant watching Holland, who was a fit 29, bound up ahead of him every day.
Even Tom Holland, who has been playing Spider-Man through a decade’s worth of giant Marvel productions, was confused and disoriented when he first arrived on The Odyssey’s set in Morocco. “I remember walking down this beach for half an hour, and I’m just seeing Greek soldier, Greek soldier, Greek boat, Greek soldier, the Trojan wars, Greek boat, Greek soldier for…. I don’t know if I’m exaggerating, but it felt like miles,” Holland told me. “And I’m saying to the PA: ‘Where is the crew? I haven’t seen any evidence of a film set. This is more reminiscent of a reenactment than it is a film set.’ ”
Holland told me that when Nolan first offered him a part in The Odyssey, the production dates were identical to those of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Holland’s commitments to the Spider-Man franchise are ironclad. “So I said to Chris, like, ‘Look, I want to do this movie, but if I’m going to do it, I’m going to have to call Sony and have a very uncomfortable conversation,’ ” Holland said. Then he immediately had a very uncomfortable conversation.
Holland made his plea directly to Tom Rothman, who runs Sony Pictures—one of the two studios, along with Marvel, that produce the Spider-Man franchise. Sony, improbably, agreed to push Spider-Man. Out of respect for Holland, but also out of respect for Nolan: “I think one of the reasons why Sony were happy to move is because Chris has that reputation of ‘This movie isn’t going to go five months over, and we aren’t actually going to lose Tom for two years,’ ” Holland said. “Any other director, it might have been a slightly different conversation.” The Odyssey started on the day Nolan said it would and finished nine days early.
One day this spring, Tom Holland was in Los Angeles for no particular reason. “I sort of live wherever the wind takes me, to be honest,” he said. Yesterday, he’d been in Miami; soon, he told me, he’d be heading to London, where he has a home, and then hopefully to Paris, Rome, and maybe Los Angeles again, tagging along with his partner, Zendaya, as she toured her new film, The Drama. (Zendaya is also in The Odyssey; she and Holland do not share any scenes, though Holland “went to set her first day of work because I just wanted to be there,” he said.) Soon, Holland would start promoting the first two major films he’s been in since 2022: The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. “No stone left unturned,” he said.
Holland and I first met in 2019. He was 23 and looked like a teenager, living outside London with his brothers and some friends. I remember a dartboard and an Avengers poster. “I was obviously drinking back then,” he said, when I asked him to reflect on that time. “I probably was enjoying myself a lot and was right in the middle of the Spider-Man run, which was the time of my life. I was falling in love. I was making movies that I was really proud of. I was building a career that I was really excited about. And then now I have had this amazing moment where I feel like I got to hit the reset button”—Holland has since gotten sober—“and end the chapter of being a kid in Hollywood.”
We were at the Soho House in West Hollywood. Holland, six years on, remains incredibly youthful—there is a reason that, though he is now 30, he is still being cast as someone’s son. He inspires an almost protective impulse from his older collaborators. “I really adore that guy,” Damon said. “And he’s handling a lot of scrutiny. He and Zendaya both, individually and together, are dealing with a lot more than I had to. And I think doing it really gracefully.”
The only sign that Holland had aged since I saw him last was a certain stillness, a relative ease in his own body. Over the past few years, he’d basically stopped working. “I needed a break, and I felt like I’d overworked and I needed to do some growing up in my personal life, which required me to have some time at home,” Holland said. “And then also I just wanted to make sure that I was always in love with what I was doing. I think to do what we do, we’re so lucky, and the moment it becomes a chore, there’s something wrong. I don’t know if there was a moment where I doubted being in love with it, but it just felt a little bit like I was not doing my best work, because I was just going to work.”
During his self-imposed break, Holland played a lot of golf, built a house in London, and started figuring out who he was outside of being a giant movie star. Pattinson, who has acted in three different films with Holland, told me: “I feel like he kind of lived out his sort of crazy years in the amount of time which you’re supposed to, which is maybe, like, eight years, and I really stretched mine out. I’m like, ‘I’m going to be 22 till I’m 39.’ But it’s weird. I feel like everyone from his generation is very…. They’ve got quite sensible.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily describe it as wild, and more at times lonely,” Holland said, when I relayed what Pattinson had said. “I had my times, but I wasn’t necessarily the nightclub-going person as much as I could sit at home in my hotel room and finish a minibar and go to work the next day. So my version of wild was very, I guess, un-Hollywood. I was always pretty sensible. I just drank too much.”
What finally got Holland back to work were his obligations to the Spider-Man franchise and a call from Nolan. Holland credits The Odyssey with improving Spider-Man: Brand New Day, too, because of the extra time the franchise had to hire director Destin Daniel Cretton and develop the fourth film after Sony pushed it. “The Odyssey almost saved Spider-Man because we wouldn’t have had Destin,” Holland said. “He wouldn’t have been ready to make the movie when we were ready to go. We wouldn’t have had the six-month period to develop the script with Destin to get it to a place where it is now. And I truly believe that we’ve made the best version of any Spider-Man movie going. So while it was a tough pill to swallow for Sony, I think in hindsight, they’re very grateful that it happened.”
Holland remembered arriving on The Odyssey set and being stunned at the sheer speed and efficiency with which Nolan worked. “I think coming from the Marvel space, and I think this will upset Marvel a little bit—his level of preparation is unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” Holland said. “There’s not a single question you can ask him that he can’t answer immediately. He’s also quite simple in the way that he works. There are times when they use fancy camera tricks and things like that, but he really does come to set and he finds the shot.” The first sequence Holland showed up to shoot was scheduled to take two days; at lunch, Nolan informed the cast and crew that they’d do it in one, and by nightfall they were done.
During The Odyssey’s production, Holland’s collaborators on Spider-Man got used to hearing about Christopher Nolan. “I was really able to lay down the law and say, ‘We are not going to come to set and figure it out,’ ” Holland said. “ ‘We need to know why we are making this movie beyond the fact that it’s Spider-Man 4 and they make loads of money and we’re going to just have a big summer. Why are we making this movie?’ And Destin was super instrumental in that, but it was just really great to constantly be calling up the studio and [producers] Amy [Pascal] and Rachel [O’Connor], who I love, and be like, ‘Well, Chris is doing it this way. This is how I think we should be doing it.’ ”
In the end, Holland had two weeks between the two productions, leaving The Odyssey behind to play a character that he has been playing since he was 18 years old. Holland, at times, has seemed restive in the part. In a 2021 interview with this magazine, he gave the kind of quote an actor often regrets giving: “If I’m playing Spider-Man after I’m 30, I’ve done something wrong.”
At Soho House, I pointed out that Holland would be turning 30 in June. “It’s funny, I saw that quote pop up somewhere recently and I kind of reeled, because I was trying to remember what I meant,” Holland said. “I think the point of it is that I would love to pass the baton on, and I haven’t achieved that yet. It’s definitely something that we talk about a lot at the studio. So maybe I need to change the quote to 37.” Then he gave as mischievous a smile as you will ever see Tom Holland give. “I could also have been trying to leverage Sony and scare them into thinking I wasn’t going to do Spider-Man 4 now that I had a new deal on the horizon. So I don’t know what it could have been. It could’ve been part of a strategy to create fear.”
Either way, he said, back on message, he no longer felt that way. “I think the truth is that playing Spider-Man has been the joy of my life,” Holland said, earnestly. “I now kind of stand on the plinth of like, I’ll do it for as long as they’ll have me.”
It wasn’t hard to see the symbolism for Holland in doing the two films, The Odyssey and Spider-Man, back-to-back: the future and the past in one long summer. “It feels like the beginning of the next chapter of my life,” Holland said. “I really feel like a young man now. I have so much amazing stuff happening in my personal life to take me through to the rest of my life, and I feel like I have a new perspective on where I want to exist in Hollywood.”
Later in 2026, Holland will do a smaller movie he’s not really allowed to talk about, and then in January he will hopefully shoot the long-rumored Fred Astaire biopic he’s been developing. “Then take the rest of the year to just let the dust settle,” he said. “I don’t want to fall into the same mistakes I made as a young kid, which is this insatiable desire to just work, work, work, work, work. I want to work on the right projects with the right people. So I think just kind of: one day at a time.”
