Tom Holland, the British actor best known for playing Spider-Man, has opened up about his battles with sobriety. Speaking to the On Purpose with Jay Shetty podcast, the actor, 27, said that quitting alcohol was “the best thing I’ve ever done” after he’d been “scared” by realising the extent of his dependance.
After a “very, very boozy” Christmas period in 2021, Holland found that having resolved to complete a dry January, “all I could think about was having a drink … It really scared me”.
“I just was like, ‘Wow, maybe I have a little bit of an alcohol thing.’”
Holland resolved to extend his period of sobriety, but found it hard to do so in England, where he said he found socialising and alcohol were significantly intertwined.
“I felt like I couldn’t be social,” said Holland. “I felt like I couldn’t go to the pub and have a lime soda. I couldn’t go out for dinner. I was really, really struggling.”
In particular, he added, he found he needed to distance himself from friends in the rugby community, “because so much of it is about how much can you drink”.
“I just sort of said to myself, like, ‘Why? Why am I enslaved to this drink? Why am I so obsessed by the idea of having this drink?’”
By the actor’s 26th birthday, on 1 June 2022, he had gone for five months without drinking and said he was “the happiest I’ve ever been in my life”. He found benefits included improved sleep and ability to handle everyday obstacles.
“Things that would go wrong on set, that would normally set me off, I could take in my stride. I had such better mental clarity. I felt healthier, I felt fitter.
“I’m happy to say it – I was definitely addicted to alcohol. I’m not shying away from that at all.” Today, the actor is a “year and a half” sober.
Holland has said his journey inspired his mother to follow suit, with positive consequences.
“She’s loving it, and it’s been amazing,” he said. “I can’t believe the difference that I feel from not drinking. Yeah, I feel amazing.”
Holland is currently on a break from acting, after a gruelling shoot on Apple TV series The Crowded Room, in which he played an American criminal with dissociative identity disorder.
Holland’s career started to take off when he played Billy Elliot in the West End, before making his big-screen breakthrough with 2012’s tsunami drama The Impossible.
He made his debut as Spider-Man in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, and has since starred in three standalone Spider-Man movies. The most recent of these, No Way Home, was the highest-grossing film of 2021.
• This article was amended on 12 and 18 July 2023 to make clear that it was Tom Holland’s 26th birthday, on 1 June 2022, when he reached a five-month period of sobriety and that he spoke in the interview of now being sober for “a year and a half”.
