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Tom Holland Taking Year off from Acting after "The Crowded Room"


Thu 08 Jun 2023 | 02:43 PM
Tom Holland in "The Crowded Room"
Tom Holland in "The Crowded Room"
Yara Sameh

Tom Holland will be taking a year-long break from acting after wrapping up the Apple TV+ series "The Crowded Room". 

In an interview with Extra, the "Spider-Man" opened up about how difficult it was for him to play the role of Danny Sullivan.

“It was a tough time, for sure. We were exploring certain emotions that I have definitely never experienced before. And then on top of that, being a producer, dealing with the day-to-day problems that come with any film set, just added that extra level of pressure," Holland said.

He continued, “I’m now taking a year off, and that is a result of how difficult this show was.”

Holland pointed out he was “no stranger to hard work” and “really enjoyed” working on the series but acknowledges that “the show did break me.”

“There did come a time where sort of was like, ‘I need to have a break. I am excited to see how it turns out, and I feel like our hard work wasn’t in vain,” he added. 

"The Crowded Room" is a 10-episode limited series about a man who is arrested following his involvement in an NYC shooting in 1979. 

In the psychological thriller, Holland plays Danny Sullivan, a character based on Billy Mulligan, a man known as The Campus Rapist and the subject of a highly publicized court case in the late 1970s.

This is not the first time that Holland to addressed how difficult it was for him to play the character and opened up about his mental health.

“I’m no stranger to the physical aspects of the job doing the whole action-movie thing, but the mental aspect, it really beat me up and it took a long time for me to recover afterwards, to sort of get back to reality," he told EW in an interview.

Holland also talked about the difficulties he faced detaching himself from the character adding he had “a bit of a meltdown at home and thinking like, ‘I’m going to shave my head. I need to shave my head because I need to get rid of this character.’ And, obviously, we were mid-shooting, so I decided not to… It was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before.”

Apple TV+ will drop the first three episodes of "The Crowded Room" starting June 9 and release an episode a week every Friday after that until July 28.