While speaking with Entertainment Weekly this week, Tom Holland revealed that he’s been sober for a year and four months. He added that working on his new Apple TV+ miniseries, The Crowded Room, changed how he thinks about mental health and helped him understand his own triggers.
In the series, Holland, 26, plays Danny Sullivan, a teen who is arrested after a shooting at the Rockefeller Center in 1979. The series is inspired by a true story and based on the 1981 novel The Minds of Billy Milligan. Holland said nine months into filming he found himself struggling to separate himself from the character. “I remember having 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.”
After talking to therapists, Holland said he learned to identify what triggers and stresses him out, such as social media. He also said it took a while for him to shake the character even after the series wrapped filming. “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 afterward, to sort of get back to reality.”
The first three episodes of the series will air on Apple TV+ on June 9.
