Spider-Man: Tom Holland Surprised Chris Evans in Marvel Audition by Doing a Flip

With six Marvel Cinematic Universe appearances now under his belt and his third flagship Spider-Man movie breaking box office records around the world, it’s safe to say that Tom Holland is the definitive wall-crawler for some Marvel fans. Holland landed the part of Spider-Man back in 2015, just over a year after Andrew Garfield’s final Spider-Man movie was released to poor reviews and less-than-stellar box office, and he’s been with us ever since. Finding Holland for the part was a key component for Marvel Studios when they secured a deal with Sony to make Spider-Man movies and one moment in his audition may have been what really helped him land the part, actually flipping around.

Speaking in a new interview released by Sony Pictures for Spider-Man: No Way Home, Marvel head Kevin Feige recounted the journey to finding a new Spider-Man and how Holland (just 19 at the time that he landed the part) kept another MCU hero on their toes. “I think we flew about five actors in and had them do readings with Robert Downey Jr and it was his graciousness, he’s always so gracious, particularly with other actors, with his time. We narrowed it down there with that reading and then we did one more with Chris Evans and became very apparent that Tom Holland was not just an amazing Peter Parker but he incredibly was an amazing, no pun intended, Spider-Man. Because he had both the abilities of a great actor and the abilities of a great gymnast and stunt performer, which was just an added bonus which continues to blow us away and surprise us. I remember he did a giant flip right in front of Evans, he threw Evans off, he couldn’t believe what he just saw in front of him.”

He continued, “That dynamic between a very young Tom Holland interacting with Robert Downey Jr for the first time was exactly the dynamic we wanted between a young Peter Parker interacting with Tony Stark for the first time. And seeing our Peter grow and grow out of that, the shadow of Iron Man as we saw him start to do in Far From Home, and which he completely does now in No Way Home, and really become his own hero.”

That hero’s place in the MCU and in the hearts of Marvel fans is very clear after Spider-Man: No Way Home, with the odds of another adventure featuring Holland’s character seeming incredibly likely.