Tom Holland Almost Gave Up Acting to Become a Carpenter (Just Before Booking Spider-Man)

Somewhere in the multiverse, Tom Holland is buffing a nice wooden table.

Tom Holland, the recently-ejected member of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, has told GQ he was this close to giving up acting for carpentry.

Speaking to the magazine, he said his parents enrolled him in a six-week carpentry course around 2014, when it looked like this whole acting thing wasn’t gonna pan out for the then-18-year-old.

It came after a slump following his role in Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea, when a bit of arrogance meant he wasn’t getting hired as much as he felt he should have been.

"I basically got into this rut where I wasn't, like, taking auditions seriously, and I just thought, I'll get this job, I'll get this job. And I didn't. It was a bit of a punch in the teeth," he told GQ.

"And my mum said, 'Look, you're not getting any work, so you need to go and have a plan B. I've booked you at this carpentry school in Cardiff. Six-week course. You're gonna go, you're gonna learn to be a carpenter.'"

Though Holland said he loved this alternative pathway—learning to fit a roof and renovate a bathroom—he nonetheless kept auditioning for movies, including James Gray’s underrated The Lost City of Z.

His final audition in Cardiff was for the part of Spider-Man, which he also booked. Two years later, he’d be officially debuted in Captain America: Civil War. Of course, given Sony and Marvel’s gory break-up, his future in the role—and Spidey’s role in the MCU—looks cloudy. (For what it’s worth, Holland says "Spidey rests in Sony’s safe hands.")

Still, we should feel doubly-lucky to have gotten a Peter Parker as good as Holland for as long as we have. Who knows what might have been if he stuck with carpentry? Sure, there would have been a hard-working and affable young carpenter in the UK taking advantage of a growth trade. But 36-year-old Andrew Garfield might still be trying to convince us he’s a high schooler with webshooters.