Tom Holland's Mom Wanted Him to Be a Carpenter and Not an Actor

It's hard to envision Spider-Man without Tom Holland at this point thanks to a series of hit films, but it's even more difficult to envision a world where Holland isn't even an actor. Crazily enough that was what his mother wanted, as he revealed to Jimmy Kimmel on Jimmy Kimmel Live. During their conversation, Kimmel asked Holland if he ever considered doing something else aside from acting as a career, and while acting was always what Holland wanted to do, it was not at the top of his mother's wishlist. For her, it was all about being a carpenter, and she even sent him to school to become one after he started acting.

"I didn't, but my parents did," Holland said. "My mom, I went through a phase in my career where I was too old to play a child but too young to play a teenager. It took me a long time to grow up, and my mom decided to send me to carpentry school so she like packed my bags up and shipped me up to Cardiff and Whales, and I like rented a room off this lady and shared a room with her son for like 8 weeks."

"This was after I thought I was doing pretty good, and mom was like 'nope'. So I went to this school and I was there studying and I was getting a qualification to become a carpenter," Holland said. "And the crazy thing about the course was it was for people trying to turn their lives around. You know there's a lot of ex-cons and some tough people in there, and they're all like swapping stories and stuff, and then I'm like 'yeah, there was this one time on set when my coffee was cold man, and it was really tough.' And yeah, I didn't finish the course."

Kimmel then asked if he ended up gaining any carpentry skills, and it turns out he had them before he even went through the course.

"Yeah, pretty capable," Holland said. "My mom's side of the family are all carpenters, so my Granddad taught me when I was young, so like I built my mom's kitchen table. I built a little cabinet in the kitchen. I fixed a friend's door once."

As for that table, it's still intact. "It's still there. It's like 10 years old, it's still there," Holland said.

Thankfully for Holland, he doesn't have to pursue the carpentry avenue anymore, as we don't see his acting career going anywhere anytime soon.