Spider-Man: Far From Home stars Tom Holland and Jake Gyllenhaal sling a pose for EW's cover shoot

Spinning a web

Tom Holland and Jake Gyllenhaal are crawling onto the cover of EW for their new movie Spider-Man: Far From Home, in which Holland's Peter Parker is trying to move on from the events of Avengers: Endgame while on a trip in Europe with classmates. That's where he meets Gyllenhaal's Mysterio, who's helping Parker fight off a, well, mysterious threat. Ahead, see more photos from our cover shoot with Gyllenholland (totally calling dibs on that nickname!), and click here to see our cover and read more about the movie, in theaters July 2.

“Everyone really enjoyed the fact that throughout [Spider-Man: Homecoming], there’s always something you can relate to with him,” Holland tells EW. “So in this film, especially, we tried to tailor the script in a way so that we could hit so many different relatable scenarios, so that not a single person in the world felt left out watching this movie.”

“Peter’s ready for a vacation at the beginning of this movie, to say the least,” returning director Jon Watts tells EW of the hardworking hero. “This film is about the world telling him, ‘It’s time for you to step up and grow up, kid,’ and he’s saying, ‘But I still want to be a kid and go on vacation.’”

“You walk into a Marvel film, and it’s huge,” Gyllenhaal explains. “They’re massive. In a way, you’re expected to just jump on the train and get going. For me, it takes me a second. I get a bit overwhelmed on any set, and it takes some time to warm up.”

“Marvel does this all the time, [where] you come in, learn your lines, and then they’ll give you six pages of dialogue and say, ‘Yeah, we rewrote it, here you go, are you ready to film?’” Holland explains, saying he understood what Gyllenhaal meant when he told him he felt a bit "frazzled" after a few days of filming. “You go, ‘Wait a minute! Don’t I need to learn my lines?’ So [that’s] a bit of an overwhelming first day, and I think he needed a friend to be like, ‘Dude, it’s all good, I’ve been there.’”

“When he took on the responsibility of leadership, he did it in such a beautiful way, even though we share a difference of many years in our ages and experience,” Gyllenhaal, 38, says of Holland, 23. “I really looked up to him in that sense. He did it in such a kind way. Actors, you don’t always easily exchange that kind of kindness. [Sometimes] people offer help, or they don’t want it, or there’s egos involved. There was just no ego [from Tom].”

“If you look at any interview I’ve ever done prior to this movie and someone asked me, ‘Who would you work with if you could work with any actor?’ I would’ve said Jake Gyllenhaal,” Holland tells EW. “And when I found out it was him, I was stoked, but also really nervous. But Jake absolutely was more than I ever could have expected.”

“Tom was tired, and he just couldn’t keep it together,” Gyllenhaal recalls of a scene where their two characters shake hands. “Every single time we would shake hands, he would start laughing, so I’d start laughing, and we both couldn’t stop laughing. That went on for about 30 minutes. It was about 45 to 50 takes, and it was a disaster.”

“I don’t even remember what was funny about it,” Holland adds. “There was something about the scene where Jake and I just could not keep a straight face.”

“It’s always a bit nerve-racking when you meet someone you look up to,” Holland says. “I was just really grateful when I met [Gyllenhaal] and I found out he’s a lovely guy and a great dude.”

“[We went] from doing some really, really powerful stuff and doing a great scene to us laughing our asses off for 20 minutes and driving the crew nuts,” Holland says of his relationship with Gyllenhaal. “We’re great friends off screen, so we kind of got to allow our relationship to blossom on screen.”