Tom Holland made headlines in 2021 when he told GQ magazine, “If you’re playing Spider-Man over 30, you’ve done something wrong.” Now, not only is Holland officially 30 years old now, but he also has a new Spider-Man movie, Brand New Day, set to hit theaters on July 31st, and has no plans to quit playing the webslinger anytime soon. So does Holland believe his word? Not exactly.
“It’s funny, I saw this quote come up somewhere recently and it kind of upset me because I was trying to remember what I meant,” Holland recently told GQ magazine in the magazine’s summer cover story about the film adaptation of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
“I think the important thing is that I want to pass the baton, but I haven’t achieved that yet,” the actor explained. “That’s definitely something that’s talked about a lot at the studio, so maybe they need to change their estimate to 37. It’s also possible that they used Sony to try to scare them into not doing Spider-Man 4 now that a new deal was on the horizon. So I don’t know what that was. It could have been part of a strategy to create fear.”
Holland concluded, “I think the truth is, playing Spider-Man has been the joy of my life. I’m standing on some kind of pedestal now, and as long as they accept me, I’m going to keep doing it.”
Holland has played a key role in producing his own Spider-Man movies for years, asking Sony Pictures to delay production of Spider-Man: Brand New Day so he could star in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and in 2019 personally petitioned Disney CEO Bob Iger, tearfully on the phone asking Disney and Sony to reach a new deal to keep Spider-Man in the movie. Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“Tom reached out to the people who worked for me and said, ‘Can you give me Bob’s email address or phone number?’ Of course, I’m very guarded and they were very guarded,” Iger said at the time. “I said, ‘Sure, let’s have him contact me.'” And he did. we talked. Basically he… cried on the phone… It’s obvious that he cares a lot and in fact we care a lot about him. He’s a great Spider-Man. I actually felt sorry for him and it was obvious that the fans wanted this to happen. So after I got off the phone with him, I made a few calls to the team at Disney Studios, and then I decided to call the head of Sony and said, “We have to find a way to get this done.” Both for Tom and the fans. And we did. That’s what happened. He called me and I called them. ”
Visit GQ Magazine’s website to read “The Odyssey” summer cover story in full.
