Tom Holland: The shocking reason the new Spider-Man was bullied as a child

Unfortunately, many adolescents around the world are victims of bullyingbecause the other students believe that they are different, either physically, in their tastes or way of thinking.

However, there are people who are so mature and confident that they ignore the teasing, on the contrary, they go ahead and achieve their dreams. A clear example of this is Tom Holland, the British actor who plays Spider-Man.

After performing a Janet Jackson song, Tom loved dancing so much that his mother decided to enroll him in the Nifty Feet dance school, located in the Wimbledon area of ​​London, when he was between five or six years old. In this place, the director Lynne Page noticed the great potential that the actor had and instantly knew that he would become a great star.

Page helped put together the choreography for billy elliot, a film about a boy who decides to dance ballet despite what people say about him and which became one of the most popular films of 2000 and a West End musical. Page invited Tom to watch the Show and although it seemed impossible to him to achieve it, the British presented the tests for the role and was hired. However, before starting work on the play, he took dance classes with the best teachers in the country for two years.

At the age of 12, Tom made his stage debut playing the role of the protagonist’s friend in 2008, the same year that Marvel had already recorded three Marvel movies. spider-man with Tobey Maguire and that the Englishman admired since he was a child. After a couple of weeks of finishing the tour from billy elliotTom was contacted by Shaheen Baig, the director of casting of the movie The impossibleby Juan Antonio Bayona, who had seen a video of him on YouTube and liked him for a role in the film.

I think the meeting with Bayonne was one of the most important in my career. It got me into the world of improvisation, which has served me a lot. Basically, we passed the text and he said to me: ‘Improvise, let’s see what happens’.

– Tom Holland

During the test they made a scene in which the boy helps his mother to climb a tree in the middle of a tsunami. After Bayona asked him to do four more tests, she gave him the part and Tom made his film debut at the age of 14.

Suddenly, the actor’s luck changed and in a short time he went from dancing on stage to being in front of a movie camera. He went back to London to take his high school general exam; however, without any explanation, his life in Hollywood stopped; After becoming successful at dancing and making his film debut, Tom went through a phase where he wasn’t given any work.

At 16, Tom already had a career as a dancer, as an actor and a trade as a carpenter. This made him an unusual boy, but despite his different qualities and talents, he had to go back to school. When he returned, he was determined to study and concentrate, as he was used to working hard and professionally.

For Tom, his time in high school was not the best experience in his life, since the fact of dancing in leotards was enough reason for the boys to make fun of him.

15-year-old boys are generally idiots and I was not like that. I think that’s why I was bullied at school. I was different, I was mature. Because he did ballet, people thought he was gay. So what if I am? I’m not gay, but who cares. For me, doing ballet was an opportunity to spend two hours a day in a studio with 30 girls in tights.

The job came back along with the opportunity for three movies in a row, so he began the long process of becoming the new face of Spider-Man. He first had to send two recordings of himself, then another two, then he went to Los Angeles, California, to audition with Sarah Finn, the director of casting from the Marvel movies. He eventually did a screen test in the studio with actor Robert Downey Jr., which resulted in six more candidates for the role.

During that test, Tom asked if he could improvise, to which they explained that he had to say the text as it was written, since you don’t play with a franchise like Marvel and Sony. For the first time in his career, the actor had to learn the lines of his character, he arrived at the studio where he began to record the scene with Robert, who changed the first line and hearing that, Tom was surprised, so he improvised the second line, Robert, the third, and so on, until ten minutes had passed.

Everyone in the studio was amused by the scene between Tom and Robert, so when he left there, the boy was convinced that he had been given the part. The production asked him to stay one more week in the city just in case. However, he did not hear from them for six weeks. After this time, he received the call telling him that he had been chosen to play Spider-Man in the Spider-Man movie. Captain America: Civil War in 2016.

When we finished shooting ‘Civil War’, I thought they were going to fire me. I don’t know why, in that year and a half that passed between ‘Civil War’ and the filming of ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’, in 2017, I really believed that they were going to fire me. It was too good to be true. Getting this job was a dream come true and I couldn’t believe it had happened. I thought that at some point I was going to come back to reality and they were going to take it away from me. Thank God they haven’t.

In 2017 the saga of films began with Spider-Man: Homecominglater appeared in Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, Spider-Man: Far From Home and the most recent, Spider-Man: No Way Home. The actor assures that he loves doing these productions and that he would be happy to continue doing it until the next lucky boy comes along who gets to play him.

During his path in the process of becoming Spider-Man, Tom met Stan Lee, creator of much of the Marvel Universe, who told him the story of Spider-Man from start to finish; Stan Lee liked Tom to play the part, because of his youthful looks, he had the face to be a high school boy.

Although he has the responsibility for the continuity of a million-dollar franchise on his shoulders, he knows that if one day something goes wrong in his career, he has the job of a carpenter. Also, he knows how to play golf.

Tom Holland is a great example of ignoring prejudice while knowing what you want and pursuing your dream. We love you Tom!