Tom Holland Describes How the Russo Bros. Pitched Him CHERRY and How One Scene Took Everything Out of Him

Tom Holland is best known these days for playing Peter Parker/Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but we are about to see him in a very different role. Returning to work with Avengers: Endgame directors Anthony and Joe Russo, Holland is starring in the upcoming film Cherry as a young man who joins the army after a fight with his girlfriend, returns home with PTSD, and develops a drug-addiction that leads him to rob banks to support his habit.

In a recent interview on the Variety series Actors on Actors, Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out, Judas and the Black Messiah) asked Holland how this atypical role came to him. Holland said:

I was doing ADR for “Avengers: Endgame,” and at the end of the session they sort of took me aside and said, “We want to make this movie. It’s about a kid who suffers from PTSD and falls into drug addiction and ends up robbing banks. Would you be interested?” When they offered me the job, I was just really excited. And then when I read the script for the first time, I was like, “There’s no way I can make this film. I’ll fall apart. I can’t hold onto a character like this for so long.” It was all about preparation, and really setting out the character beats and figuring out how I was going to get from A to B in each section. The hardest part was trying to merge the sections, because the character changes so much throughout the film.

Kaluuya then tells Holland that there’s one scene in the film that was particularly hard to watch. Holland responded:

We’d finished the drug portion of the movie, and then we had sort of progressed into him falling in love, and then the Russos wrote this sequence of the movie, which is the sequence that you’re talking about. We had to revisit going back to his life as a drug addict. I remember sitting in the car, and Joe and Ant sort of came into the window, and they were like, “Don’t hold back. There’s no such thing as doing too much in this instance.” And I just went mental, really. I don’t know how else there is to describe it. I beat the crap out of my leg with that needle, which broke every time. It wasn’t a real needle — it would retract — but I was always worried that one time it wouldn’t and I would just stab myself in the leg. I bust my nose up really bad on the steering wheel, and I had a really bad bloody nose, but you can’t see it on camera, which really annoys me.

That sounds intense. I read the book that this film is based on, and it was super rough to read. I can’t imagine acting those scenes out. It will be a crazy movie, no doubt, and I can’t wait to see Holland in the role. I think he is a great actor, and I am really interested in seeing him expand his acting style.

Cherry hits AppleTV+ on February 26th