Back in May, Tom Holland opened up about his sobriety and mental health. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly about his new Apple TV+ series “The Crowded Room,” the Marvel star revealed that he decided to focus on his mental wellness because of his work on the series and that he was one year and four months sober at the time.
But in a more recent turn of events, the star has stated that it wasn’t his work on the show which caused him to ditch booze, as he was forced to address rumors that he stopped drinking after having a “meltdown” behind-the-scenes of his latest series. “The wildest rumour I’ve ever heard about myself is that I decided to become sober after having a meltdown on set, which is wildly untrue,” he told BuzzFeed in June. “I decided to give up drinking long before I stepped on set on ‘The Crowded Room.’ I was really lucky I did so, I think had I been drinking in the show, it would have been a very different experience.”
A few weeks later, during an appearance on Jay Shetty’s podcast on July 10, Holland spoke more about the extent of his drinking habits. He started his journey by taking part in Dry January, abstaining from alcohol for the whole month, but decided to continue. Holland said he had “such better mental clarity, I felt healthier, I felt fitter and I just sort of said to myself, ‘Why am I enslaved to this drink? Why am I so obsessed by the idea of having this drink?'”
In “The Crowded Room,” Holland plays Danny Sullivan, a man arrested in a shooting in the late ’70s. Through a series of conversations with investigator Rya Goodwin (played by Amanda Seyfried), Danny begins to understand himself and make sense of his complicated past. But the emotionally heavy scripts and intense filming schedule — they shot for 130 days in a row — began to weigh on Holland. He said he was used to going to physical extremes to play a superhero, “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,” he previously told EW.
“I was seeing myself in him, but in my personal life,” Holland told the outlet about his connection to the character. “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.’ And, obviously, we were mid-shooting, so I decided not to…It was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before.”
Although his prior quotes didn’t lead to him going sober, the experience inspired Holland to seek mental healthcare himself. “Learning about mental health and the power of it, and speaking to psychiatrists about Danny and Billy’s struggles, has been something that has been so informative to my own life,” he said, adding that he now recognizes triggers and things that stress him out, like social media. He added that he hopes the series will allow others to “have more respect and more sympathy for people who are going through mental health issues.”
Back in August 2022, Holland explained to fans why he was taking a social media break. “I get caught up, and I spiral when I read things about me online,” he said in a video posted to his Instagram account. “And ultimately, it’s very detrimental to my mental state, so I decided to take a step back and delete the app.” He said that Instagram and Twitter can be “overstimulating” and “overwhelming.” He also directed fans to a charity called Stem4 which has four apps that aim to help teens manage feelings of anxiety and depression.
Holland has mostly stayed off his public-facing social media since, although fans have noticed him in the likes and comments of some of girlfriend Zendaya‘s Instagram posts.
— Additional reporting by Gabriella Ferlita