Spidey loves a good punchline
There’s a wise-cracking, fun-loving guy inside the modern Spider-Man, says actor Tom Holland. He also tells Stephanie Bunbury he’s ‘sold his soul to Marvel’, and more.
‘Spider-Man movies come out every two years,’’ says Tom Holland, the latest actor to don the cobwebbed red and blue suit of Marvel Comics’ most popular superhero. ‘‘It’s like a James Bond situation: you swap Spider-Mans and you don’t really talk about it.’’ Except that we do, obviously.
Some talk about it and talk about it – visit the Twitterverse and observe the buzz of thrilled but sceptical fans readying themselves to deliver judgement on the new Spidey. Holland suggests this is something ‘‘unique’’ – the superhero as awkward high-school geek. ‘‘But I think fans are going to enjoy that,’’ he says.
Holland is 21 and very bouncy, as befits someone super-powered by the life force of a radioactive arachnid. Already well into a stellar career – he rose to fame on the London stage as Billy Elliott, then played Naomi Watts’s son in The Impossible – he was first seen as Spider-Man in last year’s Captain America: Civil War , in which Spidey became the Avengers’ rookie recruit.
‘‘For me it was very important in Civil Warwhen Spider-Man met the Avengers, he would react how I would react,’’ Holland says. ‘‘Which is to go, ‘Oh my God, hey Cap!’ and sort of freak out a little bit. I’m very lucky: I’ve been shadowing the story of Peter Parker with my own life. But without superpowers.’’
Spider-Man has had a lot of incarnations since he first started crawling the walls in 1962. Comic storylines have included a Parker clone who became the subject of a spin-off series and a body swap with an evil opponent; meanwhile, the everyday-world Peter Parker has been through school, university, several real-world jobs and a marriage. This film goes right back to the first stories, in which a young Peter Parker, at a selective school for science whizkids, first discovers he can cling to a wall with his feet.
‘‘It’s definitely different from Spider-Man movies before or from any superhero movie ever,’’ Holland says, ‘‘because it is about a 15-year-old kid who has to go to school, do homework, likes Lego, has a best friend. It’s quite a funny dynamic to see a kid be a superhero, but also to see these grown-up Avengers who are now a team have this kid try and bat his way in.’’ Tony Stark – Iron Man, played once again by Robert Downey – is his mentor.
‘‘He’s like a big brother and a dad at the same time,’’ Holland says. ‘‘I think the relationship is more interesting from Tony Stark’s point of view. We have never seen him caring about someone other than himself.’’
Holland spoke to Fairfax at a Spider-Man junket for European press. They won’t show us the movie; all we see are a couple of trailers and a few minutes from the beginning of the film showing Michael Keaton in his own origin story as the villain.
He’s a scrap dealer whose livelihood clearing wreckage left by invading aliens (yes, invading aliens) is struck out when a sinister bunch of officials, claiming to represent the city government, orders him off site. He then goes rogue, stealing the scrap and turning it into fanciful weaponry he sells on the black market. Keaton as a villain who has his reasons. What else?
‘‘You will have to go to the cinema to find out what you want to know,’’ Holland grins.
Even from the trailer, however, there are hints that this is a lighter, brighter kind of SpiderMan. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films (2002 and 2004) starring Tobey Maguire were full of highstakes drama including the perils of Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst), Spidey’s one true love. The two Amazing Spider-Man films (2012 and 2014) with Andrew Garfield, now reviled by fans, borrowed more than half a cup of The Dark Knight’s existential gloom. A couple of years later, following the success of the jokey Guardians of the Galaxy and the millennials’ cult favourite Deadpool, the genre controls seem to have been reset to laugh-mode.
Homecoming director Jon West comes from a comedy background: when he was picked for SpiderMan: Homecoming, he had been directing pieces for the satirical website The Onion. Even so, he isn’t convinced that this amounts to a deliberate policy to take the whole thing less seriously.
‘‘Spider-Man was always the wisecracking superhero,’’ he says. ‘‘When I think about what it would be like to be Peter Parker, I think it would be so fun to be 15 and able to do what he can do. I wanted to capture that fun spirit and with that comes a lot of humour, because he is not a perfect superhero yet. He is still learning and making mistakes.’’
He makes a lot of those mistakes at school; like the early comics, Homecoming is as much about the agonies of high school as it is about nixing weird bad guys with retractable webbing. Some fans who have been invited to see the film – and to tweet about it, almost always ecstatically – compare it to the ‘80s movies of John Hughes. Peter Parker was originally bullied at school by the jocks; now he is taken down by carping rich kids. He also spends a lot of time on Instagram and the cleverest kid at his school is a girl. These are modern times, after all; there is not even any romance, just a crush that never goes anywhere.
‘‘It’s a very typical, ‘Oh I think she’s cute,’ and, ‘I think he’s cute,’ and they get very nervous around each other and that’s kind of it,’’ Holland says. ‘‘It’s the most kiddie version of a relationship ever.’’
But there is plenty of time for that, as my grandmother would have said. A sequel is already scheduled, along with another Avengers film including Spidey.
‘‘Forever, I’m on it forever,’’ crows Holland. ‘‘I don’t know how long, but I know it’s a long time. I’ve sold my soul to Marvel.’’
He has no idea which direction the character is headed in, but it is worth remembering Spider-Man used to have rebel cred; a survey of US college students in 1965 ranked the web-slinger as a revolutionary icon on a par with Che Guevara and Bob Dylan.
If he follows that trajectory again, he could become the superhero for our Trumpist times. Or perhaps he already is. Best check Twitter.
Spider-Man: Homecoming (TBC) is in cinemas from July 6.
'When I think about what it would be like to be Peter Parker, I think it would be so fun to be 15 and able to do what he can do.' Tom Holland