13 Struggles Tom Holland Had To Overcome (That Many Fans Never Knew About)

All actors face obstacles on the way to a successful career — and achieving success creates its own new challenges. This goes doubly true for those who break into acting at a young age, as child stars often have horrible experiences and put Hollywood on blast as a result. Tom Holland, who made his stage acting debut at 12 years old in "Billy Elliot: The Musical" and had his first live-action movie role four years later in "The Impossible," prefers not to talk too much about his personal life. But he appears to have navigated the transformation from child actor to superstar status as Spider-Man better than most in his position would have.

Speaking to GQ, Timothée Chalamet described the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Spider-Man actor as "level" and "good Hollywood." But staying "level" in Hollywood still means facing many problems, both in one's personal life and in one's career, and if not handled with care, these problems could have tragic outcomes. Here's an overview of the biggest struggles that Tom Holland has faced, and how he managed to either overcome them or at least not let them get in the way of his successful career.

At seven years old, before he got into acting, Tom Holland received a diagnosis of dyslexia, a learning disability that affects reading. To get their son better educational supports to deal with this condition, Tom's parents sent him to the Donhead private prep school. This cost them a lot of money — especially since they sent Tom's brothers to the same school so none would feel left out.

Tom Holland sees ups and downs to his experience with dyslexia, telling The Times, "It held me back, and I had trouble reading and writing, but if you look at some of the great creatives, they're all dyslexic." As for how he's dealt with it, he explained to 11-year-old YouTuber Jazlyn Guerra in 2021, "It's just about taking your time ... giving yourself an appropriate amount of time to do the things you need to do." He still sometimes struggles with spelling, something that his followers on social media have noticed.

Tom Holland got into acting through his love of dance. Choreographer Lynne Paige noticed 10-year-old Holland at his hip hop class and encouraged him to audition for Elton John's hit West End show "Billy Elliot: The Musical," based on the Stephen Daldry movie about a boy ballet dancer. After two years of training, Holland made his big acting debut, first as Billy's friend Michael before being promoted to the title character.

From an adult perspective, this is all a very impressive accomplishment. To the boys at Holland's school, much less so. During those two years of training, Holland was constantly bullied by his classmates for dancing ballet. Even making it to the West End didn't make Holland any more popular at school.

We can all be thankful Holland didn't give up dancing in response to all this toxic masculinity — the world is a better place with his "Umbrella" performance in it. As for those bullies, some of them have gone on to reconnect with Holland in light of his Hollywood career. "I've humored them," he said to The Times. "I'm not going to get anything out of being a d***."

Having a successful acting career as a child doesn't automatically lead to continuing that career as an adult. Tom Holland thought he'd made the jump successfully after booking the role of Thomas Nickerson in Ron Howard's 2015 film "In the Heart of the Sea" at age 18, but the confidence that part gave him turned into overconfidence. With such a big credit on his resume, he thought he didn't need to take auditions seriously anymore — and he wasn't getting work because of it.

His mom told him he needed a "plan B" in case his acting career faltered, so she booked him into a carpentry course. He ended up loving carpentry, so in the alternate universe where Holland didn't get cast as Spider-Man, that's what he'd probably be doing now. But of course, while he took this course, he also started taking auditions more seriously again. One of the auditions he got was for Spider-Man, and the rest is history. Tom Holland's life was never the same after getting the role of Spider-Man.

What is Tom Holland's greatest performance? Based on his 2021 GQ "Men of the Year" profile, it might very well be his appearance of confidence. "As a kid, a lot of my confidence was really fake," he told the magazine. "But, really, inside I was, 'Oh, my God, I'm f***ing terrified.'" This fake confidence proved so convincing that director Joe Russo couldn't believe it wasn't genuine.

In the same article, Holland says that one of his greatest flaws is that he's "an impossible people pleaser," and his intense fear of being disliked made it difficult for him to stand up for himself in the past. He credits his MCU co-star Elizabeth Olsen for teaching him how to stick up for himself more. Olsen's advice? "'No' is a full sentence. 'No' is enough." This advice not only improved his life, but his work: saying "no" to ideas he disliked on films like "Spider-Man: No Way Home" led to better new ideas.

Out of all of Tom Holland's great struggles, his ongoing failure to keep secrets about his work with Marvel Studios is perhaps his most infamous. A 2021 Looper article about every time Holland let an MCU spoiler slip counted six such instances. Marvel president Kevin Feige played off Holland's spoilerific reputation one time for a marketing stunt, while another time Holland spoiled the plot of a non-Marvel movie he wasn't even in, "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" (its director, J.A. Bayona, directed Holland in "The Impossible"). And that article was written before "Spider-Man: No Way Home," for which Holland unleashed even more spoilers.

Has Holland taken any steps to improve himself at avoiding these spoiler leaks? It's hard to say: he hasn't appeared in a Marvel film since "No Way Home," and the next "Spider-Man" movie is just starting pre-production. At this point, however, filmmakers have to know what the risks are when having Holland talk about their movies.

To play a heroin-addicted Army veteran who turns to bank robberies in Joe and Anthony Russo's 2021 Apple TV+ film "Cherry," Tom Holland joined the long list of actors who dramatically lost weight for a movie role. Through a limited diet of 500 calories a day and a brutal physical training routine, Holland lost approximately 27 pounds — almost a quarter of his body mass. To make things even more punishing, because of the order the film was shot in, he then had to gain all that weight back for the Army scenes.

The experience took a toll on Holland's health and affected his relationship with food. He told GQ, "I think I would find it very difficult to find a role that would warrant that sort of abuse on my body again." In the end, most would say all that punishing work wasn't worth it — while critics admired Holland's performance, they mostly disliked "Cherry" as a whole, brushing it off as a terrible attempt at Oscar bait.

In 2016, when Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley signed on to star in director Doug Liman's "Chaos Walking," based on the acclaimed YA sci-fi novel by Patrick Ness, it must have sounded like an exciting project. Five years later, when Lionsgate dumped it in theaters amidst the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to awful reviews and massive box office failure, no one cared. Yet even this unsuccessful release was an improvement upon no release — and in fact, we almost never got to see "Chaos Walking" at all.

It sounds like the production was simply, well, chaos. The film was first shot in 2017 with an intended release date of March 1, 2019. Yet in 2018, an early cut of the film was deemed unreleasable by the studio executives, who demanded reshoots. Because Holland was working on "Spider-Man: Far From Home" and Ridley was busy with "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker," these reshoots didn't happen until April 2019, with Fede Álvarez assisting Liman, and the film's release was delayed two years to March 2021. It might have been better off staying on the shelf.

2021's "Spider-Man: No Way Home" ended up a box office phenomenon and a favorite with both fans and critics, but all this success came about from less than ideal circumstances. Shooting between October 2020 and March 2021 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Jon Watts-directed superhero sequel/multiverse crossover event was filmed on almost no real locations for safety reasons. Scenes that would normally be shot on location in ordinary times required blue screens and extensive CGI, posing challenges for the actors and resulting in some rather strange-looking shots.

Tom Holland described an awkward example of this process in a YouTube interview with Rich Roll: "When we're walking through New York, they sent a crew to New York to shoot the streets with a motion camera jib. Then they brought that piece of kit back to Atlanta and then they would make on the floor, 'There's an extra here. There's a dog here. There's a sidewalk here.' Then I'd have to map out what I was going to do in a pre-existing shot." He added, "You can feel it in the film." He's not the only star to criticize the effects of "No Way Home" either: Green Goblin actor Willem Dafoe also commented on the film's bad CGI.

Tom Holland realized he'd developed a drinking problem while partaking in "Dry January" in 2022. He found the month much harder to get through than anticipated, and was constantly thinking about wanting a drink. Challenging himself to a second month without alcohol confirmed that this was a real struggle for him — but as difficult as it was, he stayed motivated to beat his addiction, and he's been sober ever since.

On the Jay Shetty Podcast, Holland discussed how quitting drinking was "the hardest thing I ever did." Six months into his sobriety, he realized, "I could sleep better. I could handle problems better ... I felt better. I felt fitter. And I just said to myself, 'Why am I so obsessed with having this drink?'" In October 2024, over two years into his sobriety journey, Holland launched the non-alcoholic beer Bero, which he described in the official press release as the product of his desire "to create something that reflected my lifestyle and values." (via ABC News)

Being able to "sleep better" while sober is a big deal for Tom Holland, because the most dramatic health problems he's divulged revolve around sleep. His many sleep issues have included sleep paralysis (a state in which someone is conscious but unable to move), sleepwalking (the opposite of sleep paralysis, where the mind is asleep but the body is moving), and even sleep undressing (self-explanatory).

These sleep issues are tied up with anxiety — and it seems one of the biggest sources of his anxiety is the paparazzi. In a recurring nightmare described in his 2021 GQ "Men of the Year" profile, Holland wakes up with sleep paralysis while paparazzi photograph him in his bedroom. "They're all there, and I'm looking for my publicist, like, Where is the person who's supposed to be protecting me? What's going on?" Holland said. "And then when I am able to move again, I turn the lights on, and it's over, and I think, Oh, my God, I'm in my room, I'm fine. There's no one here. But then I will get up and look for a recording device or something that someone has put in my room."

In the Apple TV+ miniseries "The Crowded Room," Tom Holland played Danny Sullivan, a criminal with dissociative identity disorder, based on the real-life story of Billy Milligan. As has become a pattern with his more ambitious dramatic roles, critics praised Holland's performance while leaning mixed-to-negative on the show as a whole.

The intensity of the mental health issues explored in "The Crowded Room" was new territory for Holland. He told EW, "I'm no stranger to the physical aspects of the job doing the whole action-movie thing ... But the mental aspect, it really beat me up and it took a long time for me to recover afterwards, to sort of get back to reality." At one point, inhabiting the character proved so overwhelming that Holland had "a bit of a meltdown" and almost shaved his head to break from the role, but ultimately stuck with it. In the end, he found the role "informative to my own life," taking what he learned about mental health on the project and applying it to his own self-care.

Around the same time "The Crowded Room" premiered in 2023, Tom Holland announced plans to take a temporary hiatus from both acting and social media. Given how Holland described the intensity of "The Crowded Room" shoot, many media outlets attempted to connect those comments with his desire to take a break, painting a sensationalized picture of him being so broken down by celebrity that he could no longer do his job.

Speaking with Rich Roll on YouTube, Holland objected to this framing, pointing out his break was planned before he began work on "The Crowded Room" and that not using social media shouldn't be twisted into a tragedy. "I think it's really disappointing that a young person in my position who's lucky enough to have the power to say, 'I'm gonna take some time off for myself' gets painted as something negative," he said. "We all work too hard. And we should put our lives first. I've always lived by the idea that I work to live, I don't live to work. And I think that it's really unfortunate that that's what people took from the idea of me taking a break."

Tom Holland returned to acting after his year off in the summer of 2024, playing Romeo in the Jaimie Lloyd Company's West End production of "Romeo and Juliet," opposite Francesca Amewudah-Rivers as Juliet. Colorblind casting is common practice in contemporary Shakespeare productions, and Amewudah-Rivers is far from the first Black woman to play Juliet, but nonetheless her casting was met with waves of racist harassment online.

While this was Amewudah-Rivers' struggle first and foremost, it certainly couldn't have been easy for Holland to see his co-star receive so much hatred. This was a situation where Holland's attempts to spend less time online were a double-edged sword: being offline meant he was less exposed to harassment, but it also meant he never responded on his social media to the abuse of Amewudah-Rivers when many felt it would have been helpful. Arsema Thomas, who plays young Lady Danbury on "Bridgerton," expressed disappointment that Holland hadn't addressed the issue on Instagram.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues or an eating disorder, contact the relevant resources below:

• The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

• The National Eating Disorders Association website or contact NEDA's Live Helpline at 1-800-931-2237. You can also receive 24/7 Crisis Support via text (send NEDA to 741-741).