Tom Holland Opens Up About How Sobriety Has Changed His Life
It's a warm October day in New York City, but the locals drifting in and out of the lounge at the Greenwich Hotel are fully committed to their cosy autumnal aesthetic. The hotel, too, seems to be resigned to a wintry gestalt; thanks to a roaring fire in a monumental hunting-lodge hearth, the dimly lit lounge is almost 30°C.
Tom Holland sits in a striped silk armchair near the fireplace. He is wearing white On running shoes, wide-leg trousers and an ivory sweatshirt that he quickly peels off, issuing a muffled apology from within the fabric as his t-shirt rises with it. Behind him are shelves of ancient books and a taxidermied antelope head. He is lit from the right by the fire and a lamp with a large, red shade, and every divot in his face, especially the cleft in his chin, is deeply shadowed. He looks primed for a live reading of one of the tomes behind him.
I am studying Holland for signs of unusual rizz (formerly known as charisma). ‘Tom is the ultimate rizz master,’ Timothée Chalamet recently said in an interview for LADbible TV. ‘The internet knows this. Zendaya knows this. Everyone knows this.’ It’s true that the internet erupts with commentary whenever Holland steps out, particularly if he steps out with Zendaya, the megastar to whom he recently got engaged. But I’m having trouble articulating the magnetism. ‘It’s kind of, like, an intangible thing,’ says Spider-Man director Jon Watts. ‘You look at him and you just love him.’
To be clear, I see that the 28-year-old British actor has the obvious prerequisites for rizz: he is charming and intelligent and confident. I have also seen his 2017 Lip Sync Battle performance, in which, to Rihanna’s Umbrella, he dances energetically in a corset and tight leather shorts and ends with a front flip, landing on his back on a flooded stage. I understand that he, like Spider-Man’s alter ego, Peter Parker, has hidden capabilities that are perhaps infinite. But sequestered in the corner of the hotel lounge, he gives me the impression not of suavity but of intense sincerity.
Perhaps that’s because he’s not here to promote a film. In fact, he is emerging from a year-long break from acting. ‘It was just something I needed to do,’ he explains. ‘I had been acting flat-out since I was 11.’ That was when he auditioned for Billy Elliot: The Musical in London. A few years after Billy Elliot, he was cast in The Impossible, opposite Naomi Watts, and then as Spider-Man in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. He’s since played Spider-Man in two Avengers films and in three stand-alone Spider-Man movies, with a fourth on the way, all the while taking on white-knuckle films like Cherry – in which his character is walloped first by love, then by combat, addiction and bank robbery – and The Crowded Room, a psychological thriller in which he plays a young man at the centre of a disturbing crime. He’ll also be joining Matt Damon and Zendaya in Christopher Nolan’s retelling of Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, slated for release in July 2026.
His sabbatical was a page break before a new chapter, one in which he is better positioned to both continue his rapid ascent in Hollywood and enjoy the life it has bought him. He owns a house in London, just a few miles from where he grew up in Kingston-upon-Thames, which he fills with friends and family.
He does carpentry, and he golfs habitually and very well (his handicap is 2.9). He and his two brothers recently played in a tournament with pro golfer Tommy Fleetwood and won. ‘It was the best day of my life. I called my lady and was like, “Listen, I’m thinking of turning pro,”’ he jokes.
He and Zendaya share a dog, Noon, and recently got another, a doberman named Daphne. ‘She’s so cute, man, it’s actually a joke,’ he says, holding up his phone to show a photo of a guilty-looking puppy. ‘This is her in trouble because she just pooed in my house.’ Holland doesn’t have the schmoozy charisma we’ve come to expect from our superheroes. What he has is much harder to fake.
Going Sober
Holland's sincerity persists even when he’s discussing his new line of non-alcoholic beers, Bero, which he is currently promoting; after we meet, he’ll head to an event where he’ll pitch the beers to scores of bartenders. At this point, in the celebrity arms race for products, we have all witnessed actors suddenly turning robotic when discussing their new brands, but Holland becomes more animated when he talks about Bero. It’s personal for him, he explains.
In January 2022, he decided to take a one-month break from alcohol, and during that month he realised how tightly woven into his social life drinking was. ‘Every Friday after work was a write-off: let’s get drunk and have a good time. I didn’t have bad experiences, but I would drink enough so that I would ruin my next day,’ he says – enough, he has said, that he had an enlightening conversation with his doctor about the health of his liver. He often craved alcohol at social events, and he found his first month of sobriety unsettlingly difficult.
He found he needed to distance himself from his mates in the rugby community, where socialising is often centred on drinking. He recalls one time when he drove one of his brothers to a poker night. Midway through the event, Holland asked him if he could drive them home instead; he felt as if he needed a drink to enjoy himself. His brother was surprised. ‘It was a bit of an eye-opening moment for me and for him,’ Holland says. ‘It’s really helpful when the people closest to you start going, “Are you sure?”’ He decided to push himself through a second month, then a third, then six months.
He began to see positives. He loved waking up early to go golfing on Saturday mornings – previously a dead zone, Friday nights being what they were. He also found that he could better navigate stressful situations. For instance, a few months into his sobriety, in May 2022, he was working on The Crowded Room alongside Amanda Seyfried and Emmy Rossum. That set, he says, ‘was not a very harmonious place, and there was a lot of arguing and butting heads’. The project was a trial by fire for a newly sober actor. ‘I thought, if I start drinking again now, with all this going on, it’s gonna get worse, right?’
He adjusted to sobriety without formal treatment. ‘I’m quite strong-willed. When I decide to do something, I’m really gonna do it,’ he says. ‘I leaned on close ones a lot: family, friends, old colleagues, new colleagues, people who reached out who I didn’t know who were also sober.’ He actually had a formative conversation in this same chair, next to this same antelope, early on in his sobriety. He was having a rough week and longed for a drink. His lawyer came to the hotel to talk with him. ‘He gave me a really poignant piece of advice that helped me get through everything, which was: you’ll never wake up the morning after a night out and wish you had a drink. That really rang true to me, because my problem was that I would have one drink and be fine, and then I would just go too far.’
After six months alcohol-free, he considered bursting from the cocoon of sobriety with a blowout 26th-birthday party, but by then he didn’t even want to. Now, three years dry, he has emerged as a champion of sober living – an avatar for a broad swathe of young adults who have stopped or limited their drinking.
‘You see all the headlines suggesting that it’s the Gen Z 20-year-old that isn’t drinking any more,’ says John Herman, who has been working with Holland for a year as Bero’s CEO. ‘And that’s true to a point.’ (Recent research from Mintel suggests around a third of people in Britain aged 18 to 24 don’t drink alcohol at all.) ‘But if you look at this past Dry January [2024], [about 30%] of people in the age range of 35 to 54 participated, and that’s massive. There is this consumer moment that’s still in the early innings, but it’s so far beyond where it was five years ago. You just don’t have to fight upstream.’
Non-alcoholic beers were very useful to Holland during his first year of sobriety. ‘My boys? Big drinkers. Golf. Pubs. Lads’ holidays. And not one of them ever chastised me for not having a drink at the bar,’ he says. But he still wanted to feel more included at bars, and he was underwhelmed by the available options. He was adamant that Bero be appropriately foamy, for instance. ‘A lot of these non-alc beers, you pour them out into a glass, and you get these kind of gross bubbles at the top, like a pint of apple juice,’ he says. Early iterations of Bero, he adds, were sometimes too foamy. ‘They would ship them to London in the sample stage, and I’m like’ – he mimes an explosion with his hands – ‘blowing up my kitchen.’
The final result has a satisfactory foam and comes in three variations: Kingston Golden Pils, Edge Hill Hazy IPA, and Noon Wheat, after his and Zendaya’s dog. A stout is in the works. Holland is aware that launching Bero has added pressure to his sobriety – a cocktail could result in a tabloid headline – but he feels the attention will help him to stay on track. ‘You can’t sing this song and then not walk the walk,’ he says. ‘I think part of me, when I announced it, I almost felt vindicated or relieved.’
There is nothing studied about how Holland discusses his sobriety. He doesn’t sensationalise his difficulties, and he is matter-of-fact about his successes. Herman says he was stunned by how self-possessed Holland was in the face of his stardom. ‘At his core, he’s just a normal guy who is really close with friends and family.’ One has the sense, listening to Holland talk about his sobriety, that however tectonic the change has been for him, it’s just one in a long line of dramatic transformations.
Bulking Up
Actors are often required to change their bodies for roles, especially in the superheroverse. This is true even when the hero you’re playing is meant to be a bit slight. Over the past decade, Holland has had to swing between peak fitness and tormented desiccation as he’s juggled Spider-Man appearances with projects like Cherry and The Crowded Room. On a normal day, he eats just one meal – he batch-cooks vats of chilli con carne or something similar at home – but when dropping weight for The Crowded Room in particular, he restricted himself even further, a process he describes as ‘extremely painful’.
He prefers bulking up for roles, and he’s currently trying to put on weight for his upcoming projects, though his spartan meal preferences present a challenge. ‘I really have to think about eating three times a day. Breakfast, lunch and dinner to me is an extortionate amount of food.’
But Holland has been honing his physique for roles since he was tapped for Billy Elliot, which premiered at Victoria Palace Theatre in London in 2005. The headmaster of White Lodge, the Royal Ballet School, had spotted Holland during a performance by his street-dance club. The actor trained in dance and acrobatics for over two years before he took the stage as Billy. ‘The show was incredibly taxing on the body. I couldn’t do it now. Eleven-year-old me would annihilate me now in a fitness race,’ he says. When he returned to school after the show, he was stunned to find that he was much faster than all his classmates. Fitness, he realised then, was something he was good at.
His penchant for acrobatics helped him later, when he was auditioning to play Spider-Man. ‘He just was so young and sweet, and just charming, and then in the audition, he did a full backflip, like a standing backflip, in addition to being really great on tape,’ recalls Watts, who directed Holland in the first three Spider-Man films. ‘It was like watching a video of the real Peter Parker.’
‘Tom is somebody who cares a lot about other people. He has a sense of responsibility and duty,’ says director Joe Russo, who, along with his brother Anthony Russo, directed Holland in Captain America: Civil War, his Spider-Man debut, and then later in Cherry. At the time, Russo says, they were meeting ‘every kid under every rock in every country’ to try to find the next Spider-Man. One day, casting director Sarah Finn called to say she’d found their guy. ‘He was all the things that reminded me of what I loved about Peter Parker as a kid,’ Russo recalls. ‘And he was a movie star. He had that movie-star quality. The charisma, the confidence, the energy.’ Russo also remembers being wowed by Holland’s entrance: ‘He entered the scene at one of the auditions by doing a flip!’ (Take note, young actors: a little old-fashioned razzle-dazzle doesn’t hurt.)
There were many physical challenges to come. For the third Spider-Man film, No Way Home, for which Holland says he was the fittest he’s been since he was 11, he worked with Duffy Gaver, a modern-day Philoctetes renowned for training on-screen heroes – from Brad Pitt, ahead of Troy, to Chris Hemsworth, for Thor. Holland appreciates Gaver’s rackside manner.
The actor doesn’t respond well to militaristic ‘drop and give me 20’-style encouragement, he explains, and he liked that when Gaver gave him a daunting workout at 5am on a Monday before a 12-hour workday, he would say, ‘Just see how far you get.’ (Holland always finished the workouts.)
That doesn’t mean Gaver went easy on him. Before No Way Home, Holland and a friend he was training with did daily HIIT workouts. ‘We got into crazy shape. We were so fit,’ he says. ‘A Monday morning would be this hour-long workout: one pull-up, two dips, three press-ups, four sit-ups, five squats – that’s round one, and you basically go all the way up to 10, so the last round is 10, 20, 30, 40, 50. And then you’ll go all the way back down to one. That is a monster workout.’
It worked. A behind-the-scenes clip has circulated online showing Holland shooting stunts as Spider-Man. He races through parked cars, hitting every mark, and leaps off a springboard into a front flip with stunning energy and precision. ‘Peter Parkour’, one commenter quipped.
Holland has begun to suspect, as he approaches 30, that he will not be able to do flips forever. Recently, he was on the south coast in Cornwall with Zendaya and his family, when one of his young cousins asked him whether he could do a backflip. Holland said he could, and his cousin asked him to demonstrate. ‘So I went outside and I was getting ready, and I was thinking, I can do this. I can totally do this. I’ve done this thousands of times. And Z was there, and she was like, “Are you sure you can still do this?”’ He reassured her, bent down and launched himself. ‘I actually did land it, but I pulled every muscle in my stomach, because when you do a backflip, it’s all about extending up as much as you can and then tucking. For weeks, I could not laugh because my stomach was so sore.’ Stars – they pull every muscle in their bodies trying to impress children, just like us.
Handling Fame
As our interview nears its end, Holland’s eyes flit to the doorway of the lounge repeatedly. Word has spread that he’s here, and more and more guests wander in, side-eyeing him while pretending to admire the space. A woman takes a seat nearby, her back to us but a tension in her shoulders suggesting she is listening. At one point, Holland suddenly stops speaking mid-sentence. He contorts himself, shrinking down into the depths of the armchair until his top half is nearly horizontal. ‘That lady is taking a picture,’ he says, grimacing, then straightens up. I turn around and see a middle-aged woman, neck extended as she looks imperiously down at her phone over her glasses. She pokes at her screen, not realising she’s been spotted.
He embraces the attention from his fans but acknowledges that it can sometimes be limiting. He cannot easily go to a play at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, for instance. ‘It’s booked in advance, we sort it all out, we call ahead to the theatre and make sure we can get somewhere private,’ he says. Besides the prospect of being swarmed by fans, he is sensitive to the fact that his being at a theatre could draw attention from the actors. He uses this as an excuse to avoid most non-mandatory public events, with the exception of Zendaya’s premieres, though he adds that he doesn’t typically walk the carpet with her – ‘because it’s not my moment, it’s her moment, and if we go together, it’s about us’.
He does occasionally pop out to the shops, though that too can be fraught. He was recently in a Whole Foods in Los Angeles when a fight, unrelated to him, broke out between two men. ‘They’re like going at it, right behind me,’ he recalls. He jumped into the fray and grabbed one of the men, leading him away. ‘I can see that he’s recognised me immediately, and you could see the wheels turning, like, I’m really angry, but Spider-Man is telling me to calm down,’ he says, laughing. ‘So, yeah, I go to the supermarket.’
Holland has said that he’s always looking for ways to remove himself from acting, to more easily lead a normal life. When I ask him whether Bero is an off-ramp – a step towards ejecting himself from Hollywood – he clarifies that it is a passion project; for now, he is glad to be Spider-Man.
A normal life is far off for Holland. Although, he says cheerfully, ‘When I have kids, you will not see me in movies any more.’ He will golf and he will be a dad. ‘Golf and dad. And I will just disappear off the face of the earth.’
But repeatedly during our time together, I’ve been struck by how normal he already is. He’s startlingly well adjusted, not just for a young celebrity but for any 28-year-old. Just as Peter Parker often seems awed by his capabilities, Holland still seems awed by his career. When I ask Watts to describe the most Tom Holland thing he’s ever seen Tom Holland do, he answers immediately, ‘His expression at the end of the dance he did, to Umbrella, where he’s like, “Oh, you didn’t think I could do that, did you?” He’s exhausted and can’t believe he just got through it perfectly, and he’s just so happy and so proud. I love it.’
The man in that video obviously has rizz. But he doesn’t just have rizz. ‘The thing that impresses me the most,’ says Joe Russo of Holland, ‘is that he has become an international movie star from the time we met him until now. He is hounded by the press. He’s in a very high-profile relationship. And he has remained exactly the same through all of it. Completely genuine, completely earnest, and as lovable as he was the day he first walked into our office for his first audition.’
It would be an oversimplification to say Holland has an ‘everyman appeal’. He is an everyman who through determination and commitment – the ‘strong will’ that has kept him sober – landed in extraordinary circumstances. And much like Peter Parker, it hasn’t changed him a bit.
Bero is available online at berobrewing.com and at select locations.
Quickfire Q&A
Exercise you love to hate?
Bulgarian split squats.
Workout anthem?
The new Linkin Park track The Emptiness Machine.
What’s your favourite film?
I take no shame in saying Avatar.
Last book you read?
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin.
Last time you cried?
My granddad’s funeral was a few weeks ago. Happy tears. He lived a fantastic life and was a great grandfather and taught me carpentry.
What’s the last thing you made?
Some cupboards at our house in LA. They’re still standing.
Meal you make to wow a partner?
Recently I’ve been doing this really nice lentil chilli, basically a chilli con carne but with lentils.
Euphemism for sex?
That’s my lady; I’m not getting into that!
This story appears in the March 2025 issue of Men’s Health UK.
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