Tom Holland, MCU’s Spider-Man, will be loosening the web as he takes year off from acting. Holland has been intimately transparent on his suffering mental health due to his starring role on Apple TV+’s upcoming dark, psychologically driven limited series The Crowded Room. During an interview with Extra, Holland explained that filming the show made him want to break away from acting entirely.
“It was a tough time, for sure,” Holland (Uncharted, Cherry) stated about shooting The Crowded Room. “We were exploring certain emotions that I have definitely never experienced before. And then on top of that, being a producer, dealing with the day-to-day problems that come with any film set, just added that extra level of pressure. I’m now taking a year off, and that is a result of how difficult this show was.”
Swinging back from acting, Holland also disclosed that he’s swinging into sobriety and focusing on mental health awareness.
“I’m no stranger to the physical aspects of the job doing the whole action-movie thing. But the mental aspect, it really beat me up and it took a long time for me to recover afterward, to sort of get back to reality,” Holland told to EW. “I was seeing myself in him [Danny], but in my personal life. I remember having a bit of a meltdown at home and thinking, like, ‘I’m going to shave my head. I need to shave my head because I need to get rid of this character.’ And, obviously, we were mid-shooting, so I decided not to… It was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before.”
It’s a good time for Holland to lay low from acting since Marvel’s Spider-Man 4 has been postponed, like many other movies and television shows, by the ongoing Writer’s Strike. Rolling off the cape of Comicbook, rumor has it that Hollywood actors will soon join the strike in solidarity. It’s a good time for a lot of high-profile actors to suit up in self-care.
Starring in The Crowded Room, Holland is “Danny Sullivan, a shy, anti-social teen from Upstate New York who is arrested after a shooting at the Rockefeller Center in 1979. Through a series of discussions with investigator Rya Goodwin (Amanda Seyfried), Danny comes to better understand his own mental health, the people in his life, and the tragic events that led up to the incident.”
The first three episodes of The Crowded Room drop June 9 on Apple TV+, the rest will trickle out weekly.