‘Avengers: Endgame’ Director Says Tom Holland Did Not Get a Script

Famously loose-lipped Spider-Man star Tom Holland did not receive scripts for the two-part Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, confirms Joe Russo, who directs with brother Anthony.

“Yeah, Tom Holland does not get the script. Tom Holland gets his lines and that’s it,” Russo said at the Endgame Indian Anthem Launch. “He doesn’t even know who he’s acting opposite of. We’ll just, we use like very vague terms to describe to him what is happening in the scene, because he has a very difficult time keeping his mouth shut.”

The Russos have long joked Holland is the least trustworthy Marvel star, who are traditionally kept in the dark because “it’s a burden to bear for them,” Russo previously told Games Radar. ” It’s probably easier to have read a fake script and a fake ending because they don’t have the pressure of knowing what happens in the movie and then they have to hide it.”

Holland earlier elaborated on the Russo brothers’ go-in-blind approach, saying he knew little about what he was shooting when filming Infinity War.

“I remember for Avengers, the Russo Brothers are like ‘so you’re just standing here, and you’re fighting this guy and just do whatever,’ and I’m like, ‘okay, who am I fighting?’” Holland said at ACE Comic Con Phoenix last January.

“And they were like ‘well, we can’t tell you because it’s a secret.’ I’m like, ‘okay so what does he look like?’ And they’re like ‘well, we can’t tell you because that would give it away,’ so I’m like ‘how big is he?’ ‘Well, we can’t tell you because that would give it away.’ So, I’m just standing there punching the air for 15 minutes and when I took the job I didn’t think that’s what I’d be doing. I’ve gotten used to it now.”

Such precautions proved prophetic as Holland once accidentally spoiled the tragic ending of Infinity War — in which Spider-Man is among the victims of Thanos’ (Josh Brolin) universe-halving snap — moments before a first-showing audience saw the film.

“We went to this screening and someone had told me before they had already seen the film, they’ve already seen the film,” Holland confessed at Comicpalooza. “So they give me a microphone and I walk on stage and I’m like, ‘Don’t worry, I’m still alive!’ The whole audience look at me like, ‘What the hell does that mean? What do you mean you’re still alive?’ And then I look inside, Kevin [Feige], Joe and Anthony are like, ‘Shut up, shut up, stop talking!’ So opening night, I ruined the movie for about 300 people, so I’m so sorry for that.”

“It is very difficult when your job is to sort of personalize these stories, personalize these characters, and sort of bring all your creative, collaborative energy to a process that lasts many, many months — sometimes more than a year — it’s a big part of your life,” Anthony Russo said in December when explaining the duo’s extreme safeguarding.

“So it’s very hard not to talk about this stuff, because you live with it for so long and you live with it so deeply. We have developed a process where you take pressure off of people by letting them know less. It’s less responsibility they have to edit themselves, so we’ve developed an elaborate process by which we try to only let people know what they absolutely need to know. And it makes a little bit easier for them to edit themselves.”

Avengers: Endgame opens April 26. Holland reprises his role as Peter Parker-slash-Spider-Man again in Spider-Man: Far From Home, out July 5.

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