Tom Holland will be taking a year-long break from acting after wrapping up The Crowded Room. The actor stars in the Apple TV+ series and is opening up about how difficult it was for him to play the role of Danny Sullivan.
“It was a tough time, for sure,” Holland said during an interview with Extra. “We were exploring certain emotions that I have definitely never experienced before. And then on top of that, being a producer, dealing with the day-to-day problems that come with any film set, just added that extra level of pressure.”
He continued, “I’m now taking a year off, and that is a result of how difficult this show was.”
The Spider-Man: No Way Home star said he’s “no stranger to hard work” and he “really enjoyed” working on this series but acknowledges that “the show did break me.”
“There did come a time where sort of was like, ‘I need to have a break,’” he added. “I am excited to see how it turns out, and I feel like our hard work wasn’t in vain.”
The Crowded Room is a 10-episode limited series about a man who is arrested following his involvement in an NYC shooting in 1979. In the psychological thriller, Holland plays Danny Sullivan, a character based on Billy Mulligan, a man known as The Campus Rapist and the subject of a highly publicized court case in the late 1970s.
This is not the first time that Holland talks about how difficult it was for him to play the character and opened up about his mental health.
“I’m no stranger to the physical aspects of the job doing the whole action-movie thing,” he told EW in an interview. “But the mental aspect, it really beat me up and it took a long time for me to recover afterwards, to sort of get back to reality.”
Holland talked about the difficulties he faced detaching himself from the character adding he had “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.’ And, obviously, we were mid-shooting, so I decided not to… It was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before.”
Apple TV+ will drop the first three episodes of The Crowded Room starting June 9 and release an episode a week every Friday after that until July 28.
