How Spider-Man Tom Holland Earned Batman Michael Keaton’s Respect (Exclusive)
Holland tells TheWrap how he won props from Keaton, who will play his nemesis in “Spider-Man: Homecoming”
Matt Donnelly | April 5, 2017 @ 12:42 PM
Last Updated: April 5, 2017 @ 1:29 PM
Tom Holland thrived as Spider-Man in last year’s blockbuster “Captain America: Civil War” — but starring in a standalone movie is a different challenge. And his “Spider-Man: Homecoming” villain, Micheal Keaton, thinks he’s up for it.
Holland told TheWrap that Keaton paid him a huge compliment for standing his ground with the “Homecoming” producers, and even compared Holland to himself on the set of 1989’s “Batman.”
It happened, Holland told TheWrap, when he lobbied to make every action sequence as plausible as possible, which sometimes meant delaying shoots.
“I really stuck by my guns … and eventually they went with what I said. Michael took me aside and said, ‘Look, that’s what I did in Batman. I always tried to make sure that what I was doing made sense, and that I could possibly happen,'” Holland said in an interview at CinemaCon 2017.
“My big thing was always trying to ground Peter’s powers in reality, which meant never putting him in a situation he can easily escape from. And that choice would [often] completely reconfigure the scene that we’d have to do, which would waste two hours in re-rehearsing,” he continued.
“So it felt like something I should keep doing,” Holland said of Keaton’s advice. “But also a compliment at the same time.”
Jon Watts directs the pair in the July 6 release, which sees Keaton play the villainous Vulture. “Homecoming” also stars Marisa Tomei, Zendaya, Donald Glover, Martin Starr, Jon Favreau, Kenneth Choi, Logan Marshall-Green and Robert Downey Jr.
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Major studios, major stars and a ton of breaking news and first-look footage is being covered all week long at TheWrap. See who we've spotted so far...
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Marvel Pictures czar Kevin Feige arrives to hype the Sony Pictures release "Spider-Man: Homecoming."
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