Robert Downey Jr. saved Tom Holland’s first Spider-Man scene from being cut down

Tom Holland remembers Robert Downey Jr standing up for him big time.

The Iron Man star did it when they filmed 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, in which he first put on the Spider-Man suit, he said Thursday on The Rich Roll Podcast.

While Holland had auditioned with eight pages of dialogue — “a long scene” for audition, which is “typically” about two pages — that was no longer the case.

“My scene had been cut down significantly from what I’d done in the audition, to now a page and a half or maybe even two pages,” Holland said. “And we start shooting the scene, and Downey piped up and was like, ‘Where’d all the kid’s lines go?'”

The explanation was that the lines would need to be trimmed because the entire script was too long. Directors Anthony and Joe Russo also said they didn’t have enough time to spend on the scene, Holland recalled. Iron Man didn’t give up.

“And Downey was like, ‘No, no, no. You’re gonna want to spend some time on this,” Holland remembered Downey saying. “Like, ‘Let’s shoot the whole thing from the audition. You can always cut it, but you’d wanna have it.'”

In the end, Holland said, “They used all of it.”

Holland’s work as the webslinger has been a massive hit, and he went on to make Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far from Home; and Spider-Man: No Way Home.

EW reported in September that Marvel was closing in on a director for a fourth installment of Holland’s Spider-Man movies. They were eyeing Destin Daniel Cretton, the director of 2021’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

He spoke about a sequel on the podcast.

“We have a creative and we have a pitch and a draft, which is excellent,” he said. “It needs work, but the writers are doing a great job. I read it three weeks ago, and it really lit a fire in me. [Costar and girlfriend] Zendaya and I sat down and read it together, and we at times were bouncing around the living room like, this is a real movie worthy of the fans’ respect.”

And that’s important to him.

“I definitely don’t want to just make a movie for the sake of it, because that’s not what Spider-Man represents,” Holland said. “So, yeah, it’s a complicated one.”

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