Tom Holland says he is taking a year off from acting to look after his mental health, after having a “tough time” and “a bit of a meltdown” while working on his latest project.
The 27-year-old British actor is currently promoting Apple TV+ thriller series The Crowded Room, which he both starred in and produced. Holland plays a character loosely based on “the Campus Rapist” Billy Milligan, a US man who claimed to have 24 alternate personalities and was the first individual to be found not guilty by reason of insanity on the basis of dissociative identity disorder.
Holland, speaking to Extra on Wednesday, said that he had “loved the learning curve of becoming a producer”, but juggling those responsibilities while playing a character with severe mental illness had pushed him too far.
“I’m no stranger to hard work,” he said. “I’ve lived by the idea that hard work is good work. Then again, the show did break me. There did come a time where I needed a break and disappeared and went to Mexico for a week and had time on a beach and laid low. I’m now taking a year off, and that is a result of how difficult this show was. I am excited to see how it turns out. I feel like our hard work wasn’t in vain.
“It was a tough time, for sure,” he added. “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.”
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly in May, Holland said The Crowded Room had left him struggling to extract himself from the role, and that he even considered shaving his head to “get rid” of the character.
“I was seeing myself in him, 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,’” he said. “And obviously, we were mid-shooting, so I decided not to. It was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before.
“I’m no stranger to the physical aspects of the job, doing the whole action-movie thing,” he added. “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 has previously spoken about trying to protect his mental health in the public eye, including taking a break from social media and being sober. He said the show had helped him understanding his mental health better, saying it helped him with “recognising triggers” and “things that stress me out”.
In 2021 he said he was considering giving up acting entirely, saying, “I don’t even know if I want to be an actor … I started acting when I was 11 and I haven’t done anything else, so I’d like to go and do other things. Genuinely, I’m sort of … having a midlife crisis – at 25, I’m having like a pre-midlife crisis.”
Holland stars in The Crowded Room opposite Amanda Seyfried. The series, written by A Beautiful Mind writer Akiva Goldsman, starts on Friday on Apple TV+.
