Tom Holland Reveals Year-Long Sobriety Inspired by His New Apple TV+ Series

Spider-Man star Tom Holland’s new Apple TV+ series The Crowded Room has had a profound effect on his life – so profound, in fact, that Holland has been sober for a year (and four months) now. In a new interview about The Crowded Room, Holland explains that his role in the show made him do some hard reflection on his own life and mental health – especially after a whirlwind couple of years making movies like Uncharted, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Cherry (another project Holland did with Apple TV). 

In The Crowded Room Tom Holland plays “Danny Sullivan, a shy, anti-social teen from Upstate New York who is arrested after a shooting at the Rockefeller Center in 1979. Through a series of discussions with investigator Rya Goodwin (Amanda Seyfried), Danny comes to better understand his own mental health, the people in his life, and the tragic events that led up to the incident.”

Clearly, it’s a psychological thriller (based on a true story chronicled in the 1981 novel The Minds of Billy Milligan, The Crowded Room) that called for Holland to go to some intense places – so much so that the role began to bleed into his real life: 

“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,” Holland explained to EW. “I was seeing myself in him [Danny], but in my personal life. 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.”

After recalling how his friends and co-stars (Sasha Lane) helped him through, Holland reflected on how playing Danny, and tackling the subject of mental illness, changed his own outlook on life and behavior, inspiring his sobriety and other investments in his own mental well-being:

“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,” Holland said, adding that he hopes The Crowded Room will make “people will feel educated about the powers of mental health, the struggles, [and] our incredible abilities to survive.”

The Crowded Room stars Tom Holland as Danny, Sasha Lane (American Honey) as Danny’s friend/roommate Ariana, Amanda Seyfried (Mean Girls) as investigator Rya Goodwin, Emmy Rossum (Shameless) as Danny’s mom, Candy, Will Chase (Nashville) as his step-father, Marlin, and Sam Vartholomeos (Bridge and Tunnel) and Levon Hawke (Blackout)  as Danny’s pals Mike and Johnny. Crowded Room will release its first three episodes on Apple TV+ on June 9. The rest of the episodes will stream weekly thereafter.