Note: this came out before his engagement to Zendaya was confirmed!

Tom Holland covers the latest issue of Men’s Health, and it’s turned into a weirdly controversial interview. It’s especially odd because the controversy is about an offhand comment he made about how he makes a point of not walking the red carpet with his long-time girlfriend/now-fiancee Zendaya when the carpet is for one of her premieres and events. People are acting like Tom was unspeakably smug or full of himself, but I think people are really underestimating how famous Tom is on his own, not to mention the collective heat score Tom and Zendaya have together. It’s also weird that the offhand comment is getting more headlines than everything Tom says here about his sobriety – the bulk of the piece is about his line of nonalcoholic beers, Bero, and how Tom has been sober for three years. Some highlights:

How he spent his one-year sabbatical from acting: He fills his house in London with friends and family. He does carpentry, and he golfs habitually and very well (his handicap is 2.9): He and his two brothers recently played in a tournament with English professional golfer Tommy Fleetwood and won. “It was the best day of my life. I called my lady and was like, ‘Listen, I’m thinking of turning pro,’” he jokes. He and Zendaya share a dog, Noon, and recently got another, a Doberman named Daphne. “She’s so cute, man, it’s actually a joke,” he says, holding up his phone to show a photo of a guilty-looking puppy. “This is her in trouble because she just pooed in my house.”

He stopped drinking in January 2022: “Every Friday after work was a write-off: Let’s get drunk and have a good time. I didn’t have bad experiences, but I would drink enough so that I would ruin my next day,” he says—enough, he has said, that he had an enlightening conversation with his doctor about his liver. He often craved alcohol at social events, and he found his first month of sobriety unsettlingly difficult.

He adjusted to sobriety without formal treatment. “I’m quite strong-willed. When I decide to do something, I’m really gonna do it. I leaned on close ones a lot: family, friends, old colleagues, new colleagues, people that reached out that I didn’t know who also were sober.”

His sober lawyer gave him advice: “He gave me a really poignant piece of advice that helped me get through everything, which was: You’ll never wake up the morning after a night out and wish you had a drink. That piece of advice really rang true to me, because my problem was that I would have one drink and be fine, and then I would just go too far.”

He prefers to eat light, so bulking up for roles is difficult: “I really have to think about eating three times a day. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner to me is an extortionate amount of food.”

He will not be able to do backflips forever: Recently, he was in Cornwall, on the southern English coast, with Zendaya and his family, when one of his young cousins asked him whether he could do a backflip. Holland said he could, and his cousin asked him to demonstrate. “So I went outside and I was getting ready, and I was thinking, I can do this. I can totally do this. I’ve done this thousands of times. And Z was there, and she was like, ‘Are you sure you can still do this?’” He reassured her, bent down, and launched himself. “I actually did land it, but I pulled every muscle in my stomach, because when you do a backflip, it’s all about extending up as much as you can and then tucking. For weeks, I could not laugh because my stomach was so sore.”

The attention from his fans can be overwhelming: “It’s booked in advance, we sort it all out, we call ahead to the theater and make sure we can get somewhere private,” he says in a yada yada yada tone. Besides the prospect of being swarmed by fans, he is sensitive to the fact that his being at a theater could draw attention from the actors. He uses this as an excuse to avoid most nonmandatory public events, with the exception of Zendaya’s premieres, though he adds that he doesn’t typically walk the carpet with her—“because it’s not my moment, it’s her moment, and if we go together, it’s about us.”

He’ll quit acting when he becomes a dad: “When I have kids, you will not see me in movies anymore.” He will golf, and he will be a dad. “Golf and dad. And I will just disappear off the face of the earth.”

[From Men’s Health]

Again, why are people picking on the “it’s not my moment, it’s her moment, and if we go together, it’s about us.” That’s not arrogance, it’s just factual. If Zendaya and Tom walked a carpet together for one of her premieres, that would be the story… alongside Zendaya’s fashion (which is always the story). He didn’t say that no one would pay attention to Zendaya or that he’s a bigger star or whatever. What he said was extremely respectful to her, as always. Like, he would do anything for his lady. If Zendaya wanted him to walk a carpet with her, he would. This is obviously something that they talked about and figured out together.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, cover courtesy of Men’s Health.