Spider-Man star Tom Holland went to college in Cardiff just months before landing his Avengers role as his parents made him have a back-up career just in case acting didn’t work out.
Six years on from his first appearance as Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War it seems like an unbelievable choice for the 25-year-old Londoner, who has starred in some of the recent highest-grossing films of all time, including Spider-Man: No Way Home and Avengers: Endgame.
But the former child star was training as a carpenter in Cardiff early in 2015 before being cast in his massive Avengers role in July of that year.
Speaking in an unearthed clip of Tom on chatshow Jimmy Kimmel Live he revealed that despite his success in his breakout role of Lucas in The Impossible – a drama about the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 – and his hit role in the West End as Billy Elliot, his mother, Nicola, kept things down to earth by creating a back-up plan for him.
Kimmel asks him in the interview if there was ever a time he considered doing anything other than acting and Tom says: ” I didn’t, but my parents did.
“I went through a phase in my career where I was too old to play a child but too young to play a teenager, it took me a long time to grow up,” he laughs.
“My mum decided to send me to carpentry school. She packed my bag up, shipped me off to Cardiff in Wales and I rented a room off this lady and shared a room with her son.”
Kimmel interjects: “This was after you made the movie?”
“This was when I thought I was doing pretty good,” answers Tom. “And mum was like ‘no!’
“So I went to school and was training to become a carpenter and the thing about this course was, there were a lot of people trying to turn their lives around, thre were ex-cons on the course and they were all swapping stories.”
The young actor went on to joke that his best grumble was his coffee was cold on set once and that he didn’t finish the course.
But with a family of carpenters, Tom isn’t without some non-acting skills, telling the host that he’s made his parents’ kitchen table, cabinets and fixed friends’ doors.
Since he left Cardiff, Tom has done alright for himself to be honest.
The chirpy and likeable actor has starred in three stand-alone Spider-Man films, Uncharted with Mark Wahlberg, Cherry and is signed up to star as Fred Astaire in a new biopic.
