Tom Holland may be a bankable global superstar, but he’s self-aware enough to know his latest role in Christopher Nolan epic The Odyssey marks the start “of a new chapter of my life”.
The British actor, best known for his Spider-Man franchise, tells me it’s “a real pinch-me moment”.
He’s playing Telemachus, the only son of Odysseus – one of Greek mythology’s most enduring heroes.
Telemachus was so young when his father left for the Trojan wars that he doesn’t remember him – except through the already mythical stories told about his exploits, cunning and bravery.
Holland, now 30, says “the thing that I love the most is that it feels a little bit like the last chance for me to play a boy”.
That’s clearly true in real life – he is now a married man (though talking about his nuptials with US actress Zendaya is off limits in our interview).
But on screen he shines (alongside a stellar cast) as a boy searching for the absent father he has put on a pedestal, while trying to protect his mother Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway) from the predatory men – the so-called suitors – who have taken over their palace.
Holland’s now-wife also appears as the goddess Athena, although – unlike in the Spider-Man movies – never on screen with her actor husband.
Holland tells me he read the script with her, “which I don’t know if I was supposed to”.
When he met Nolan the next day, “he asked me if I would be OK with him asking Zee to play Athena… I went home and I was able to break the news to her… it was a very special moment”.
I ask him how Zendaya reacted. “The little corners of her mouth went up. She had this little smile and then we both started jumping around the kitchen.”
The film sees tour de force performances from not just Holland but Matt Damon as Odysseus, who spends 10 years fighting the Trojan wars and another 10 trying to get back home.
Damon says that when Nolan called, he told him: ‘I’d like to offer you the lead role.’
“So I just said ‘Yes’. And he goes ‘Don’t you want to hear what it is?’ I said ‘Sure’. And he said ‘It’s a two-word pitch. The Odyssey’.”
Hathaway pulls off another outstanding performance as Penelope, the wife of Odysseus and mother of Telemachus.
I ask the Devil Wears Prada star, who recently announced she was pregnant, what she learnt about motherhood from the film.
“Well, it was really interesting to kind of translate what the world that I live in and what my idea of being a loving mother is to 3,000 years ago.
“There’s no such thing as gentle parenting in ancient Greece! The stakes were really, really high. And there was sometimes a need for her to scare him [Telemachus] in order to keep him safe. It just made me grateful that I feel like I have more avenues available to me now.
“But I also, you know, I don’t know what it is to raise a teenage boy. My kids are still very young, at least they feel young.”
The Odyssey also made me reflect on the debate around masculinity. As Holland explains: “Maybe what you can learn from this movie about masculinity is that it comes in all shapes and sizes and there is no version of it that’s perfect.”
He also learnt a new skill for the movie: “I did a lot of swordfighting, which I loved”.
I wondered how useful he thought that might be in his life going forward.
He jokes that though he doesn’t keep a sword at home for obvious reasons, if someone broke into his house, “I have a cricket bat actually, and I can wield that in a sword-like fashion”.
Holland may be a fully-fledged member of the A-list but he comes across as very down to earth.
“I just live my life the way my parents raised me,” he says, to not “take anything for granted”.
Unlike Damon and Hathaway, it’s Holland’s first time in a Nolan movie, a major moment in any actor’s career.
“Before you’ve worked with him and before you’ve got that call, you think about it a lot and you yearn for that opportunity and then you get the opportunity and that comes with a lot of pressure,” Holland explains.
From the outside, it makes complete sense that Nolan would pick Holland, a young actor from Kingston-upon-Thames who has such star quality that his rise has felt effortless. From a tear-jerking performance as Billy Elliot on the London stage aged 12, via Spider-Man to The Odyssey.
Nolan calls him “one of the great actors of his generation”, high praise from a director who, as Holland puts it, “is spoilt for riches with the list of actors that he’s worked with” – and whose movies are treated as major global events.
Did that mean Holland was daunted at the thought of working with one of cinema’s greats?
“Absolutely,” he tells me – but he took the approach that “I’ve got what I wanted and now it’s time to show him what I can do”.
But even the director himself was a little intimidated as he began adapting Homer’s 2,700-year old story. His last film, Oppenheimer, had just won seven Oscars and grossed around a billion dollars worldwide.
It’s quite a lot to live up to but “you have ways of coping”. Out of sight, out of mind seems to be his strategy.
Nolan’s son walked into his office when he was writing the new film and noticed that the Oppenheimer Oscar statuettes had disappeared.
“I said to him very seriously, I’m trying to write a new project and if I’ve got Oscars sitting on the shelf, think about how daunting that would be,” Nolan says.
“You can’t really think about what’s come before,” he adds.
What’s coming now is being hailed as another triumph, which is even more impressive when you think how dedicated Nolan is to shooting as much as he can for real – real ships, real seas, a real Trojan horse on a real beach.
In the early days, as news emerged about the film, Elon Musk hit out on X about casting decisions, including the choice of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. He shared a post by a right-wing blogger which accused Nolan of altering characters for awards-season or diversity-related reasons. Others then accused Musk and the blogger of racism and pointed out that Helen was a mythological figure, the daughter of Zeus who is born from a swan’s egg.
I’m one of the lucky few to have already watched the movie – and in the way Nolan would like all of us to: in an Imax cinema. Helen’s story is intriguingly told in the film, with a twist, and The Odyssey is a visual feast, the first feature film ever shot entirely on Imax film (“if you want naturalism, if you want to show somebody the way the world looks, celluloid film is the way to do it,” says Nolan).
He pushes back on my suggestion that he’s smuggling high art in the form of Homer’s story through the medium of a superhero movie.
“When you go to Homer, it’s a very crowd-pleasing story. It’s popcorn stuff. I mean that’s the joy of it and that’s why it’s endured for this long.”
Nolan’s aim, he tells me, is to “bring something fresh to the audience”.
“When Hollywood makes a mistake, it’s always the same mistake, which is to forget how much people want something new, how much they want something they haven’t seen before,” he adds.
In The Odyssey he’s taking audiences through familiar stories that have been passed down from generation to generation, but through fresh eyes.
In Nolan’s world, the horse – dreamt up by the wily Odysseus to trick the Trojan army and get the Greeks into Troy – doesn’t have wheels. Instead, it is a vast bronze creature, full of men squashed in on top of each other.
This has “been in my head for about 20 years because I was briefly attached to direct the film Troy for Warner Brothers,” he says.
On one level, the film can be viewed as an awe-dropping spectacle. But I found myself pondering whether there are wider messages about our modern world within it – from warnings about the horrors of war to the “Law of Zeus”, as it’s referred to in the movie, to treat others as you would be treated.
Damon tells me “it’s more that something like this should be a conversation, that’s what a piece of art is there for. It’s not for us to say, here’s the message, it’s not a lecture. It’s something to be discussed.”
The Odyssey is in cinemas from Friday 17 July.
