Tom Holland revealed he convinced Sony to delay filming “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” so he could star in Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.”
In a new wide-ranging interview with GQ magazine, Holland recalled having “a very uncomfortable conversation” with Sony Pictures boss Tom Rothman last summer to make the schedule change happen — and it worked.
“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,’” the 30-year-old British actor explained.
“Any other director, it might have been a slightly different conversation,” he added.
“The Odyssey,” in which Holland plays Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, started production on time and wrapped nine days early. He shot his latest “Spider-Man” sequel immediately after.
Holland said he feels the filming delay “saved” the Marvel/Sony movie because it gave director Destin Daniel Cretton time to join the superhero project.
“I truly believe that we’ve made the best version of any ‘Spider-Man’ movie going,” Holland boasted. “So while it was a tough pill to swallow for Sony, I think in hindsight, they’re very grateful that it happened.”
While speaking about “The Odyssey,” Holland explained how working with Nolan, 55, was different from his past Marvel experiences.
“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 about the two-time Oscar winner.
He continued, “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.”
Later in the interview, Holland shared that he took a years-long break from acting before he shot “The Odyssey” and “Spider-Man 4” because he felt “overworked” and “needed to do some growing up in my personal life.”
“Also I just wanted to make sure that I was always in love with what I was doing,” the “Uncharted” star continued. “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.”
Holland’s rumored wife Zendaya also appears in both films, but according to GQ, the couple doesn’t have any scenes together in “The Odyssey.”
Still, Holland said he “went to set her first day of work because I just wanted to be there.”
Elsewhere in the GQ story, Holland’s co-stars Robert Pattinson and Matt Damon opened up about their grueling experience on the set of “The Odyssey,” which filmed for 91 days in six countries.
“The joke on the crew was we didn’t have a single easy location,” Damon, 55, stated. “Every time we’d go somewhere, we’d be like, ‘Well, Iceland will be easier.’ And then it’s raining sideways and it’s fucking freezing. Iceland was like, ‘Yeah, easy? Hey, hold my beer.’”
Damon said the filming at a Los Angeles studio lot was just as taxing since the cast had to deal with two jet engines “blowing so much water” at them.
“So it was kind of a fitting end,” Damon shared. “Even the controlled environment was cold, wet, and a little bit miserable.”
Pattinson, 40, said he noticed the cast and crew looked “exhausted” when he arrived on the set over a month after filming began.
“I started a third of the way through the movie, and they’d already been to [two] countries by that point and people just looked like…. I mean, at the end of every day, people were broken,” he revealed.
“The Odyssey” releases in theaters on July 17. “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” comes out July 31.
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