SALT LAKE CITY — There was a full house greeting Tom Holland at FanX Salt Lake Comic Convention Saturday morning.
“This is by far the loudest cheer I’ve ever had,” the “Spider-Man: Far From Home” star said as he took the stage to enormous applause from fans.
It was no wonder fans were so enthusiastic: Many of them had been waiting over two hours for the event, braving lines that wrapped around the outside of the Salt Palace Convention Center Saturday morning.
Holland covered a wide range of topics during the panel, though he did steer clear of discussing the recent controversy between Sony and Disney. He did talk about his time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though,
“As soon as I got there, I felt like I was home,” Holland said.
Speaking of the cast and crew of the “Avengers” films, he said, “It really is like a family.” Holland said co-star Robert Downey Jr. “took me under his wing,” and that “Guardians of the Galaxy” star Chris Pratt is “like my big brother.”
Kerry Jackson, co-host of the q show on local radio station X96, moderated the event. The panel was closed to questions from the audience, so Jackson took the lead in asking Holland about everything from the origins of his career as an actor to recent charity work the star has been involved in.
The 23-year-old Holland told the audience that, even though he grew up with a parent in show business (his father, Dominic Holland, is an English comedian), he didn’t always know he wanted to go into acting.
“I wasn’t always going to do show business,” he said, explaining that he attended dance classes from a young age in his hometown of London.
Through his dance classes, he was “sucked in” to an audition for the musical “Billy Elliot,” in which he played the lead role at the West End in 2010. But he told fans it wasn’t until he began working with director Naomi Watts on the film “The Impossible” in 2012 that he began to really consider a career in acting.
“It wasn’t until then that I realized, oh, wow, I could do this for a living,” Holland said. “This is way better than being in school!”
In 2016, Holland burst into the spotlight by taking on the role of Spider-Man in Marvel’s “Captain America: Civil War.” He said his life has changed since then in ways he hadn’t expected.
“It’s not easy,” he said. “You have to realize that you’ve become a role model to so many young people, and you have a duty to make sure that you live up to the expectations of what being Spider-Man means.”
To Holland, those expectations and that responsibility are important.
“I had to decide what kind of a person I wanted to be,” Holland said. “And I decided, that’s a nice person.”
Charity work is something that is important to Holland. He discussed visits that he’s made to children’s hospitals, borrowing the Spider-Man suit to meet with sick children and their families.
“From the first time I did it, I saw what an immediate impact it had on these kids, and their parents as well,” he said. “It’s a way to make a big difference in a very small way.”
Holland also discussed the charity that he and his family have set up, called the Brothers Trust. The money they raise through the charity supports several smaller charities across the world, rather than “bigger charities where you don’t know where the money is going.”
To the fans’ delight, Holland revealed that a short documentary about the Brothers Trust filmed by his brother, Harry Holland, is slated to be part of the extra features on the “Spider-Man: Far From Home” DVD.
The star wrapped up the panel by addressing what an influence Spider-Man has been for him personally.
“Peter Parker has been a massive role model for me in the last five years of my life,” Holland said.
“I didn’t get bitten by a radioactive spider and get super powers,” he said, but his life has changed immensely since his rise to fame, he said.
He compared it to how Peter Parker’s life was “flipped upside-down.”
“He’d be so good to have right now,” Holland said of the superhero. “Spider-Man could do so many things in the world right now.”