We Need More Male Role Models Like Tom Holland

You might have come across the internet’s newfound love for Tom Holland in these past few weeks. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is breaking record after record, and the excitement around Odyssey was only the start. Holland has now turned into pop culture's new favourite non-problematic celebrity, the Mr Zendaya who is irrefutably comfortable in his masculinity, the short king who got so jacked for his latest Spider-Man venture that countless memes and posts have sprung up in praise of his physique.

Now, ideally I would have asked you to think back to say, 2019, when Spider-Man: No Way Home released, or even to 2024, when his wife Zendaya did Challengers, to give you an idea of just how easily and how often he would be on the receiving end of internet trolling. But even as recently as the Odyssey promotion tour, you would come across posts saying how he is the quintessential “ugly balding Englishman”.

Truth is, Tom Holland has always been an easy target for trolls. His Spider-Man, an awkward teenager thrust into the Avengers civil war, was easy to pick apart after the quippy, charismatic twenty-something Andrew Garfield portrayed in The Amazing Spider-Man movies. The ingenuous features, smaller-than-average build, maybe most of all, his background in ballet, which together made him the best choice for the MCU’s Peter Parker, also made him the antithesis of the brand of macho masculinity that has been gaining popularity since the late 2010s.

Being so much in the public eye thanks to his Marvel role didn’t help either. The MCU’s gamble with Tom Holland’s Spider-Man only made people all the more curious how he would perform outside the comic book franchise. Holland took on the challenge head-on, stripping away his clean-cut superhero image for gritty, character-driven roles like the army-medic turned opioid addict in the Russo brothers’ Cherry, or a queer man with multiple personality disorder like in the Apple Tv+ miniseries, The Crowded Room. The other mainstream movie, if you could call it so, was his lead role in Ruben Fleischer’s adaptation of the Uncharted video games.

Now, despite his very evident acting chops, almost all of these options backfired. Films like Cherry and The Devil All The Time went unnoticed, and the rest became bait for trolls: why is a Spider-Man actor in a gay sex scene? Why is Tom Holland playing Nathan Drake when he has none of the ruggedness of the character in the video game? And, good heavens, why is Zendaya doing a risque scene in Challengers? Why is she so much more successful compared to him?

But Tom Holland is a free man, and perhaps the most free we have seen a celebrity of his stature in recent years. Let me explain.

Holland is one of the better examples of what a motivational speaker would call a man “staying in his lane”. He famously stays away from social media, and goes about his own life irrespective of what people think. That in itself is a bigger freedom than many could ask for. 

He has had no qualms cross-dressing for a spectacular lip sync battle performance most Jimmy Fallon guests wouldn’t care about. He’s unbothered by his height. He seems to be a doting partner, but doesn’t let her career define him. He is a chill guy, but will put up a fight when he deems it necessary. He’s vocal about what he wants, and seems to ultimately get it (the manifestation claims that fans make about him might be too much of a stretch, though; Holland has said he loves the Uncharted games when he’s not quite good at playing it). When he went on his character-actor run post-Avengers: Endgame, he could have played much safer roles to avoid the backlash. Behind the scenes, he has worked through his alcohol addiction, ultimately opening his own brand of non-alcoholic drinks, Bero. 

Everything Tom Holland is and does is a direct contradiction of the messaging around male authority and the “looks, money, status” dictum that manosphere creators rally for. He has been subverting every rule in that textbook, and still comes out successful at the end of the day.

And this success is all the more needed today, when only a fixed standard is increasingly being accepted as the norm for masculinity. Much research has been published around the reason why more men embrace movements like the red pill more than ever before, and the lack of support systems and positive role models have often come up as the reasons. A 2023 research published in The Journal Of Gender Studies found that "young men are not necessarily attracted to extremism for ideological reasons but because they long for identity and community, as well as to meet standards of masculinity".

You could point out here that there are many wildly famous positive role models who could live up to the challenge. Every sport has one, from wrestling's John Cena to say, football's Erling Haaland. Andrew Garfield, as we spoke about before, is a good example from the arts. Even Keanu Reeves is. But these are also men who are the paragon of the male beauty standard (if it can be called so) in ways most men won't ever be able to attain. Or, their personal charisma and street savvy make them a distant ideal.

This is not to say that Tom Holland lacks any of these. But his biggest superpower, outside the suit he wears on set, is how attainable his brand of masculinity is. He is not a 6 foot 5 Apollo or a smooth talker like his mentor and Avengers co-star Robert Downey Jr. He is just a likeable "regular dude" who does great things because he wants to get better.

Maybe that's just all it takes to be a man. To do your thing and not give a damn about what others think of it.