In a recent interview with GQ, Tom Holland revealed that his Marvel Cinematic Universe co-star Elizabeth Olsen offered some words of wisdom about coping with pressure as a big-time star. The ironic part about popularity is that just as your ambitions begin to come true, so do your fears. As his personal bubble has shrunk in recent years, he has become more defensive of it.
There’s a reason he is not around, why he hires the same people from job to job, and why he uses his spare time on personal golf courses (although he also just loves golf). Because Tom Holland has discovered that the more you answer yes to just about everything, then the more they would take, and take, until there is nothing remaining only for yourself.
“People mistake my kindness as weakness,” he says. “Sometimes I see people trying to take advantage of me because I’m a nice person. Let me tell you, when you’re a 19-year-old kid, they really do take advantage of you. You don’t know any better. Now I look back and go, “Wow, I wish someone had told me that I could say no.”
It’s a narrative about finally standing up for yourself and about Holland’s maturation. “As a kid, a lot of my confidence was really fake,” he says. “But, really, inside I was, ‘Oh, my God, I’m fucking terrified.’ ”. Holland no longer has to pretend. Don’t misunderstand him: he still wishes you to like him. He simply does not want to have to give you everything in order for you to do it. “I actually learned this from Elizabeth Olsen,” he says. “She gave me an amazing piece of advice: ‘No’ is a full sentence. ‘No’ is enough.”
And her wisdom came in useful when he was on a worldwide publicity tour for Spider-Man: Homecoming in 2017, and he was feeling overwhelmingly ill. “I was under a lot of pressure to finish the day’s work,” he recalled. “That was the first time I was really like, ‘No, I’m done now. I’ve given you everything.’”
Olsen’s guidance was especially useful while Holland was filming the closing sequence of No Way Home. (Don’t worry, there won’t be any spoilers here.) “I kept stopping [the shoot] and being like, ‘I’m so sorry, I just don’t believe what I’m saying,’” he recalled, saying that as an outcome, he and director Jon Watts collaborated to rework the dialogue. “[W]e pitched it to the writers,” Tom explained. “They rewrote it, and it works great.”
