Years after first checking his muscled self out out in his Spider-Man superhero suit, Tom Holland was similarly struck by the sight of seeinghimself asa skinny, strung-out drug addict in his new movie “Cherry.”
Holland remembers being in the editing room with directors Joe and Anthony Russo and watching the opening shot of the film (streaming on Apple TV+ Friday), where Holland’s title character Cherry – with tired eyes, a deathly pallor and looking like he hasn’t eaten in several days – runs out of his house and looks down the barrel of the camera.
“That moment is basically saying to the audience, ‘Buckle up. If you want to come on this journey with me, you can. It’s going to be really hard to watch, but I’m here to help you,’ ” Holland says. “My immediate thought was, ‘Wow, my mom is going to hate this movie.’ ”
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Tom Holland stars as a former Army medic with PTSD who robs banks to fund his drug habit in "Cherry." (Photo: APPLE)
Teaming up again with the Russos, who directed Holland in the last two “Avengers” films, the 24-year-old “Cherry” star plays the role as college student, Army medic in Iraq, dope fiend and eventual bank robber over the course of the opioid drama.
Holland’s war scenes involved flying drones, multiple speeding Humvees, a bunch of explosions, lots of running and one real-life dislocated right ankle. “I felt it go (pop) and my foot was like looking at me,” he says. Between that and the basic-training sequence, Holland figures, “I would be a terrible soldier.”
Since he’s known Holland, Joe Russo has been impressed by the young actor’s “incredible range and work ethic. He’s fearless,” the director says. As blockbusters become more and more about the event than the actors, “in a lot of ways Tom Holland is like the last great movie star.”
The hardest part for Holland – who’s currently filming “Spider-Man: No Way Home” (in theaters Dec. 13) – was the “Cherry” chapter called “Dope Life,” where Cherry comes home from war to reconnect with his wife Emily (Ciara Bravo), suffers from PTSD, gets hooked on painkillers and then begins to rob banks to fund the couple’s drug habits.
Directors Joe (far left) and Anthony Russo go over a scene with star Tom Holland on the set of "Cherry." (Photo: APPLE)
Holland worked with his makeup artist on finding different prosthetics and eyeballs to design Cherry’s strung-out look. Plus at his skinniest, he lost 28 pounds.
But didthe already trim star have 28 pounds to lose? “Not really,” Holland admits. “I had to convince my mom to not call the Russo brothers and shout at them on the phone. But it was absolutely necessary. I had interviewed lots of different people who had been through similar experiences and it seemed like the right thing to do.
“The pain which I was going through to lose the weight was only a smidge of what the people would have gone through in real life. So I was able to kind of use that as a fuel to keep going throughout the process.”
Cherry (Tom Holland) and Emily (Ciara Bravo) fall in love before he goes off to war in "Cherry." (Photo: APPLE)
At the the same time, the filmmakers – who Holland looks up to as “older brothers” – looked after their star in this period. “It’s hard to immerse yourself in those dark issues day after day. It wears on somebody, on their psyche,” Anthony Russo says. “We really wanted to make sure that Tom was empowered and supported to do this very difficult work. We knew how meaningful and powerful that would be for audiences, but we also needed to keep him in a safe space where he wasn’t hurting himself at all.”
After filming his junkie scenes, Holland found it equally challenging to then shift to filming the beginning of the movie where Cherry and Emily’s romance blossoms.
“I kept thinking I wasn’t doing a good enough job,” Holland recalls. “And (the Russos) were like, ‘Dude, just remember that for the last eight weeks you’ve been playing a drug addict and now you’re playing a young boy falling in love.’ The mental aspect of that was difficult and it took me a while to get over. But when I see the film, I don’t see any of those worries in my performance.”
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