Uncharted career regret: The performance Tom Holland called a “mistake”
Only a few years after making his feature film debut in The Impossible, Tom Holland landed the role of Spider-Man when he was just 19. Having already earned vital experience as a dancer and gymnast, which he utilised as a child playing Billy Elliot in the West End, Holland was considered the perfect choice. As a result, he has risen to become one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
Holland first appeared as the iconic comic book hero in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War and then in Spider-Man: Homecoming the following year. Since then, he’s played the character in four more films and had a very brief cameo in Venom: Let There Be Carnage.
His performance as the popular superhero has been admired by many, with lots of fans going as far as to call him the best Spider-Man of all time. Even Stan Lee, the creator of Spider-Man, believed that Holland is the most accurate version of the character, as he stated at Comic-Con, “It’s as if we created a living being to be Spider-Man, and it turned out to be Tom”.
The actor’s bankable on-screen presence has left him no issues in securing more acting jobs, although it seems as though most of his time has been dedicated to Marvel, at least for now. Still, he’s managed to squeeze some other movies into his schedule, such as voicing an elf in the Disney Pixar movie Onward, making up part of a large cast of characters in Netflix’s The Devil All The Time, and leading the Russo brothers’ Cherry.
The actor also landed another high-profile role in 2022’s Uncharted, further establishing himself as an action star. Holland was cast as Nathan Drake, the protagonist of the movie who first debuted in the video game Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune in 2007. However, Holland became the first actor to play him in a live-action adaptation, starring alongside Mark Wahlberg and Antonio Banderas.
The movie had been in the works for years—before most of the other instalments in the video game franchise had even been released. It finally materialised with direction from Ruben Fleischer and received a universal gross of $407million. Unfortunately, reviews were less favourable, with everything from the action to the casting earning a lacklustre response.
Despite Holland’s action star credentials, he didn’t seem to embody Nathan Drake properly, and in an interview with GQ, he admitted to his performance being somewhat of a “mistake”. He was too focused on looking like a tough action star, he revealed, stating, “As soon as you start worrying about ‘Do I look good in this shot?’ acting becomes something other than playing a character.”
He continued, “I think there are elements of my performance in Uncharted where I kind of fell under that spell of being ‘I want to look good now. I want this to be my cool moment.’ I had to play this very tough, very stoic guy – basically be Mark Wahlberg. My character is supposed to be a fucking action hero in this moment!”
Holland claimed that he hadn’t seen the movie, so he can’t be certain whether his efforts of looking like a rugged action star paid off, but he’s learnt not to get so caught up in appearances from now on. “At times, it was less about land a mark and go through this scene and more about land a mark, stand like this and see my bulging biceps… It was a mistake and is something that I will probably never do again,” he concluded.