Tom Holland walks into a room for an interview to promote “The Odyssey.” Waiting for him is his interviewer, Tom Holland.
Last week, Holland, the actor who plays Telemachus in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of the Greek epic, joined Holland, the British classicist and podcaster who shares his name, to discuss the much-hyped and highly divisive movie.
In the interview for “The Rest is History” podcast, Holland, the 30-year-old actor, said starring in the first feature-length movie filmed entirely with Imax cameras left him “nowhere to hide.”
“Imax is a very different beast,” the actor said. “There’s a huge difference between acting onstage to acting on screen. And then there’s an even bigger difference between acting on screen and acting on Imax.”
“You just can’t hide anything in Imax. The resolution is so good. There are no secrets. There’s nowhere to hide,” he said, adding that the format promotes “a more subtle version of performance because it can very quickly become too much.”
More coverage of ‘The Odyssey’
There are practical reasons the format looms so large for actors. Imax cameras shoot on large-format film, and a single magazine holds only about three minutes of footage at standard speed before it must be swapped.
The cameras are also notoriously loud, a long-standing obstacle to filming dialogue, which is why Imax built a new, quieter generation of camera, 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 58-year-old historian Holland 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 himself.
The pair’s shared name caused chaos online last week, when historian Tom Holland found himself at the center of a clash 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 X without specifying which one he meant, briefly leaving users unsure whether he meant the historian or the film’s star.
The pair’s interview was filmed before the Musk spat, though the historian shared similar praise to the comments that sparked 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, whether the film had traces of the superhero genre.
“Epic is not exclusive to swords and sandals and ancient text,” the actor said.
“At the end of the day, what I love about Chris [Nolan] is Chris lives to entertain. And this movie is challenging. It has topical themes. And I think it’s very relevant in today’s society. But his main focus is not to educate, it’s to entertain.”
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