Tom Holland has revealed it was Zendaya who ultimately convinced him to say yes to The Odyssey, with a characteristically direct ultimatum.
Speaking to PEOPLE alongside Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway and director Christopher Nolan to mark the film’s release, Holland described the moment he came home after his initial meeting with Nolan and broke the news to his now-wife.
“I sat down with Z and was like, ‘I’ve been offered this movie,'” he said.
“And she was like, ‘By who?’ And I was like, ‘It’s the big one.’ And she was like, ‘Chris?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s Chris Nolan.'”
The complication was significant.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day was scheduled to begin production on the same day as The Odyssey.
Zendaya’s verdict on the scheduling conflict was immediate.
“Z said, ‘I’ll leave you if you don’t do The Odyssey.'” The line drew laughter from Damon, Hathaway and Nolan. “Yes. Well, thank you to her,” Nolan said, chuckling. “Here I am,” Holland added.
Getting The Odyssey to work required Holland to go back to Sony Pictures executive Tom Rothman and ask for Brand New Day‘s production to be pushed back, a request that was ultimately granted.
Both films are now landing in the same summer, with The Odyssey in cinemas now and Spider-Man: Brand New Day arriving on 31 July.
Zendaya, who plays Athena in The Odyssey and appears alongside Holland in the Spider-Man films as MJ, was also brought to the project through her husband.
Holland revealed in a recent Access Hollywood interview that Nolan gave him the opportunity to be the one to tell her she had been cast.
“I said, ‘Just read the script again, but read Athena really closely.’ And the little corners of her mouth… It was amazing,” Holland recalled.
For Nolan, bringing Holland into his filmmaking world was something he had been keen to do for some time.
“Tom was somebody I hadn’t worked with before, but I’ve admired his work for years and really wanted to work with him,” the director said, acknowledging the logistical challenges involved.
“It wasn’t easy jamming in between a lot of different things. He’s a very busy young man, but this family came together.”
Of how the cast responded to the demands of the shoot, Nolan added: “I like to say it was a hard shoot, but hard in the right way. They rose to it magnificently.”
