Tom Holland walks into the room to do an interview promoting The Odyssey. Interviewer Tom Holland is waiting for him.
Last week, Holland, the actor who plays Telemachus in Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the Greek epic, joined Holland, the British classicist and podcaster who bears his name, to discuss the highly publicized and highly divisive film.
In an interview with the podcast “The Rest is History,” actor Holland, 30, said starring in the first feature film shot entirely on Imax cameras left him with “nowhere to hide.”
“Imax is a completely different animal,” the actor said. “There is a huge difference between acting on stage and acting on screen. And there’s an even bigger difference between playing on screen and playing in 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 refined version of performance because it can get too big very quickly.”
More reports about “Odyssey”
There are practical reasons why this format feels so big to actors. Imax cameras shoot on wide-format film, and one magazine only holds about three minutes of footage at standard speed before it has to be replaced.
The cameras are also notoriously loud, a long-standing obstacle to filming dialogue, so Imax created a new, quieter generation of cameras designed with Nolan in mind, making Imax-only production possible for the first time.
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The interview was the first meeting between 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, with historian Tom Holland calling the actor “the real Tom Holland.” He also joked that the actor’s existence has made Google’s own job more difficult.
The couple’s shared name caused chaos online last week when historian Tom Holland found himself at the center of a row with Elon Musk after defending the film against critics who called it “woke.”
Elon Musk is feuding with Tom Holland over Odyssey. No, not that Tom Holland.
The world’s richest man then insulted Tom Holland in a post on X without specifying what exactly he meant, briefly leaving users confused as to whether he was referring to the historian or the film’s star.
The couple’s interview was filmed before Musk’s argument, although the historian praised the comments that sparked it and told the guest he thought it was the “best adaptation.”
At one point, a historian asked the actor, who has played Spider-Man since 2016, whether there were traces of the superhero genre in the film.
“The epic is not limited to swords, sandals and ancient texts,” the actor said.
“At the end of the day, what I love about Chris (Nolan) is that Chris lives to entertain. And this film is difficult. It contains relevant topics. And I think this is very relevant in modern society. But its main goal is not to educate, but to entertain.”