Tom Holland walks into a room for an interview to promote “The Odyssey.” Your interviewer, Tom Holland, is waiting for you. Last week, Holland, the actor who plays Telemachus in the hit adaptation of Christopher Nolan’s Greek epic, joined Holland, the British classicist and podcaster who shares his name, to talk about the much-hyped and
Tom Holland walks into a room for an interview to promote “The Odyssey.” Your interviewer, Tom Holland, is waiting for you.
Last week, Holland, the actor who plays Telemachus in the hit adaptation of Christopher Nolan’s Greek epic, joined Holland, the British classicist and podcaster who shares his name, to talk about the much-hyped and highly divisive film.
In the interview for the podcast “The Rest is History,” Holland, the 30-year-old actor, said that starring in the first feature film shot entirely with Imax cameras left him “nowhere to hide.”
“Imax is a very different beast,” the actor said. “There’s a big difference between acting on stage and acting on screen. And then there’s an even bigger difference between acting on screen and acting in Imax.”
“You can’t hide anything in Imax. The resolution is very good. There are no secrets. There is nowhere to hide,” he said, adding that the format promotes “a more subtle version of performance because very quickly it can become too much.”
More coverage of ‘The Odyssey’
There are practical reasons why the format becomes so important to actors. Imax cameras shoot with large format film, and a single magazine holds only about three minutes of footage at standard speed before needing to be changed.
The cameras are also notoriously loud, a long-standing obstacle to filming dialogue, which is why Imax built a new generation of quieter cameras, developed with Nolan in mind, that made an all-Imax production possible for the first time.
The interview marked the first meeting of the two Tom Hollands. Their shared name has been a long-running joke between historian Holland, 58, and his podcast co-host, Dominic Sandbrook.
During the interview, the pair jokingly recreated the famous “Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man” meme, while historian Tom Holland referred to the actor as “the real Tom Holland.” He also joked that the actor’s existence had made it harder to Google him.
The couple’s shared name caused chaos online last week, when historian Tom Holland found himself at the center of a showdown with Elon Musk after defending the film against critics who dismissed it as “woke.”
The world’s richest person then insulted Tom Holland in a post on
The couple’s interview was filmed before the dispute with Musk, although the historian shared similar praise to the comments that prompted it, telling his guest he thought it was “the best adaptation.”
At one point, the historian asked the actor, who has played Spider-Man since 2016, if the film had traces of the superhero genre.
“Epic is not exclusive to swords, sandals and ancient texts,” said the actor.
“At the end of the day, what I love about Chris [Nolan] Chris lives to entertain. And this film is a challenge. It has current topics. And I think it’s very relevant in today’s society. But its main objective is not to educate, but to entertain.”