Tom Holland says his taxi driver knew he'd get Spider-Man: 'The kid I just drove here is so good-looking'

Dubai: Spider-Man: Brand New Day has spent the past few days rewriting record books on three continents, and the internet has responded the way it usually does, by digging up the best Tom Holland anecdotes and sending them round again.

The one currently doing the rounds involves a driver, a final audition and a compliment that was not quite a compliment. Holland originally told it on The Graham Norton Show in 2021, but a clip resurfaced on X over the weekend and has found an entirely new audience.

The drive

The audition process had been long. Around seven months, by Holland's account, taking in seven or eight separate auditions and several flights to Atlanta for screen tests.

By the time of the final one, his nerves were considerable and his driver was chatty.

"He's chatting to me, chatting to me, chatting to me, and I'm a polite person, but I also want to be like, 'Mate, please shut up. I'm trying to learn my lines,'" Holland recalled.

Then came the prediction, delivered via the rear-view mirror. "He goes, 'You know what, kid? I think you're gonna get it.'"

Which was, briefly, lovely to hear. Holland asked why.

"I think you're gonna get it because the kid that I just drove there? He is so good-looking," the driver replied.

Holland's response on the show: "Jeez. Thank you, that's exactly the confidence boost I need."

The follow-up

The story has a second act, which is the reason its been travelling so well.

A few months later, by then filming his first outing as Spider-Man, Holland ran into the same driver.

"And he goes, 'I told you!'" Holland said. "I was like, 'What did you tell me? That I was gonna get the part or that I was ugly?'"

For what it is worth, the driver's logic was not entirely daft. Peter Parker has never been written as the best-looking person in the room, and casting somebody who reads as an ordinary teenager rather than a magazine cover was arguably the whole point.

A better audition story, and this one is new

Here is something you may not have heard, and it involves a face from the new film.

Jon Bernthal, who plays a significant role in Brand New Day, has said he filmed Holland's audition tape for Spider-Man while the two were shooting Pilgrimage together in 2017, and that Holland returned the favour for Bernthal's Punisher tape.

Bernthal has also claimed a small slice of credit for how the tape turned out. He suggested Holland open the scene by running up a wall into a double backflip, on the grounds that none of the other contenders could manage it. Holland asked whether that was too much. Bernthal thought not, and Holland did it.

The two of them are now in the same Spider-Man film, nine years later.

What he says about the role now

At the Los Angeles premiere, Holland spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about a decade in the suit.

"There's a family here at Marvel and Sony. We've been making these movies for 10 years and we're all really good friends and we all still really love working with together and there's a shorthand, there's a collaboration, there is a shared love for this character that is Peter Parker," he said.

"When we all get together, it always feels like something magical happens, and to get to do it time and time again is something that will never really sink in for me. It still feels like this is my first-ever premiere for this character. It has been the gift of my life."

On whether he carries on, he was noncommittal in a way that was not really noncommittal at all. "I will do it for as long as they'll have me. So if this movie does good, I guess we'll see."

Given the numbers the film has posted in its opening days, that condition looks comfortably met.

Holland first appeared as Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War in 2016. Brand New Day makes him the first live-action actor to headline four solo Spider-Man films, after Homecoming, Far From Home and No Way Home.

Ten years, one very long audition process, and a driver somewhere who has been telling this story at parties ever since.