Tom Holland covers the latest issue of GQ Style. The cover pic above makes me laugh because he looks like a school kid who’s had to borrow his older brother’s clothes for a fancy-dress occasion. And clearly, he’s confused as to why they’re going, given his expression. The other photos in the spread, the ones they didn’t give us, are much better. The article itself, however, is utterly charming. I realize that I am massively biased, but I prefer to say that this interview just reinforced all that I want to believe about Tom. Zach Baron from GQ gets quite a bit of information from Tom, including his current golf obsession and how much The Mystery Blonde incident colored his views on tabloid life.

“What’s nice about golf is it’s the most humbling sport,” Tom Holland says to GQ senior writer Zach Baron whilst on a course. “Like, Avengers, for example, just became the biggest film of all time. That’s amazing, super exciting. So I’m like: ‘I’m gonna go play golf with the boys and celebrate.’ And then you play like a dick, and it brings you right back to the earth.” The 23-year-old actor covers the Fall/Winter issue of GQ Style with a photo spread by Fanny Latour-Lambert.

But he’s also been learning, sometimes the hard way, that he is returning to a world that is not the same as the one he left, as more or less a civilian, five years ago. Last week, to his great chagrin, he had what we will call his first Mystery Blonde experience. It was the most innocuous thing: On Sunday he went to a concert in Hyde Park. On Wednesday photos of him and a blonde woman approximately his age in close contact were in dozens of tabloids across the world. On that same day, the bereft reaction from thousands of Spider-Man fans who had imagined Holland in a real-life relationship with Zendaya arrived, full of fury and sadness. And then, on Thursday, in perhaps the most jarring part of it, the tabloids identified the woman he was with by name and Instagram account.

“It’s just, I’m a very private person. If you do a Google search, I’m not a tabloid person. I don’t like living in the spotlight. I’m quite good at only being in the spotlight when I need to be. Um, so…uh…it just was a bit of a shock to the system. It’s the first time I’ve ever kind of been in the tabloids. It’s the first time something like this has ever really happened to me. So it’s a bit of a shock to the system. Um, but you know, but it’s something that you look at and you go, ‘Oh, well, I just don’t put myself in that situation again.’ ”

[From GQ Style]

The whole article centers around golf, by the way. According to Zach, Tom is an excellent golfer. Samuel L. Jackson plays a lot of golf on his downtime while making films, I wonder if Tom ever tried to tag along with him? There’s a discussion I’d like to overhear. There’s another bit in which Tom talked about reaching out to The Rock over social media and was so inspired by their discussion, he went to the gym to celebrate. I can’t imagine anything that would inspire me enough to go to the gym, I usually have to be dragged kicking and screaming.

I feel bad, however, about The Mystery Blonde thing because I was part of it. I thought it was funny but when I read it in Tom’s words, I get how disconcerting it must have been, especially the speed with which it happened. Tom said the pressure of the last few years, has led him to understand how celebrities at their peak can be forced off the rails. Fortunately for Tom, not only does he have famous friends like Zendaya and Chris Hemsworth to help him navigate, he had his father, Dominic Holland, a comedian whose been showing Tom the ropes since his childhood. The interview mentioned the book Dominic wrote in 2017 called Eclipsed. It’s a satirical piece about how Dominic worked his whole life for his career and then was completely overshadowed by his son’s success. It was all over Twitter recently because many Tom stans took it seriously. Tom, who wrote the forward, loved it. He went on to credit his father not only for showing him how to be professional with reporters and in the business, but also for conquering the harder talent: comedy. Something some of Tom’s more ardent fans clearly need to work on understanding.

photo credit: Fanny Latour-Lambert/GQ Style