Tom Holland has opened up about taking over the Spider-Man franchise in 2015 from Andrew Garfield.
Garfield, 39, was released from the role after his second turn as high schooler-turned-superhero Peter Parker in 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
Garfield’s run, which followed Tobey Maguire’s spell in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy (2002-2007), was cut short following poor critical reviews and a lacklustre box office return.
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter to promote his new Apple TV+ show, The Crowded Room, Holland, 27, expressed his regret over failing to call Garfield after being named as his successor.
“That’s because of my naivete as a kid,” he said. “I was 19 when I got cast. I was so caught up in getting the role that I never took any time to think about what it must have been like for him.
“If I’d made my second movie and it didn’t necessarily deliver in the way it should have done and they recast me, I would really struggle to bounce back. Andrew bounced back in the most unbelievable way. I just wish I’d called him and just said, ‘You know I can’t turn down this opportunity.’”
Garfield has gone on to earn two Oscar nominations since his departure from the Spider-Man franchise – first for his role as Desmond Doss in Mel Gibson’s 2016 war film Hacksaw Ridge and secondly for his part as Jonathan Larson in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s biographical musical Tick, Tick... Boom! (2021).
Holland had the opportunity to talk things out with Garfield when he and Maguire, 47, reprised their roles in Holland’s third Spider-Man movie, No Way Home (2021).
“It was wonderful,” Holland told THR. “Myself, Andrew, Tobey – we have this amazing bond as three people who have been through something that is so unique that we really are like brothers. We have a great group chat and we catch up every now and then. It’s called the Spider-Boys.”
In an Actors-on-Actors interview with Zendaya (who plays MJ in Holland’s Spider-Man trilogy and is also dating the star in real life) last year, Garfield said his Spider-Man experience left him “heartbroken”.
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“When I did my first Spider-Man film, I was your age – 25, 26. And I wasn’t ready, man. I was like, ‘I need to back off, because I don’t know who I am yet. And my prefrontal cortex is still forming,’” he told her.
Garfield has previously suggested that he was too young when he was cast as Spider-Man, saying in 2016: “There’s something about being that young in that kind of machinery that I think is really dangerous. I was still young enough to struggle with the value system, I suppose, of corporate America... I found that really, really tricky.”
Elaborating, he continued: “I signed up to serve the story and to serve this incredible character that I’ve been dressing as since I was three, and then it gets compromised and it breaks your heart. I got heartbroken a little bit.”
