Tom Holland, the British actor behind Spider-Man, is back on screen in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which has already shattered box office records. Yet the blockbuster's origin traces back to a humble start in Cardiff, where Holland once trained as a carpenter.
A Back-Up Plan in Wales
The 30-year-old was learning carpentry in Wales when he first auditioned for the web-slinger role he's played for over a decade. His parents, comedian Dominic and photographer Nicola, wisely wanted him to have a fallback if acting didn't pan out. So, his mum enrolled him in a carpentry course in the Welsh capital in 2014—a time when Holland admits he "thought he was the dog's b*llocks."
In a 2019 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel's chat show, Holland recounted his brief stint in Cardiff, where he also did his first Spider-Man audition, as he later revealed in a GQ interview.
When Kimmel asked if he ever considered another career, Holland replied: "I didn't, but my parents did. I went through a phase in my career where I was too old to play a child but too young to play a teenager, it took me a long time to grow up," he laughed. "My mum decided to send me to carpentry school. She packed my bag up, shipped me off to Cardiff in Wales and I rented a room off this lady and shared a room with her son."
Kimmel interjected: "This was after you made the movie?" Holland answered: "This was when I thought I was doing pretty good. And mum was like 'no!' So I went to school and was training to become a carpenter and the thing about this course was, there were a lot of people trying to turn their lives around, there were ex-cons on the course and they were all swapping stories."
From Rooftops to Red Carpets
Holland's new film, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, hit cinemas on July 29 and has already pulled in $927m (£687m) globally, marking the second-biggest opening weekend ever. In a GQ interview, he expanded on his Cardiff days, admitting he was in a career rut at 18.
"I had just done a Ron Howard film, and I thought I was dog's b*****ks," he said. "I was like, 'I've just done a Ron Howard film. I don't need to audition for stuff anymore.' And it was quite the contrary. And I basically got into this rut where I wasn't, like, taking auditions seriously, and I just thought, 'I'll get this job, I'll get this job.' And I didn't. It was a bit of a punch in the teeth. And my mum said, 'Look, you're not getting any work, so you need to go and have a plan B. I've booked you at this carpentry school in Cardiff. Six-week course. You're gonna go, you're gonna learn to be a carpenter.'"
During the course, Holland learned to fit a roof and renovate a bathroom, and he "loved it." It was while in Wales that he completed his first audition for Spider-Man, a role Marvel fans first saw in 2016's Captain America: Civil War, followed by appearances in Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, and now four stand-alone movies.
Holland told GQ: "And then my final audition [of four] was for Spider-Man. My first Spider-Man audition was while I was in Cardiff."
Brand New Day picks up after the events of 2021's Spider-Man: No Way Home, which ended with the world forgetting Peter Parker's existence as he continues to fight crime as the masked superhero.
