Tom Holland Says Alcohol Dependency ‘Scared’ Him Before Sobriety

Tom Holland‘s journey to sobriety didn’t come easy for the actor after he realized his dependency on alcohol.

“All I could think about was having a drink. That’s all I could think about. I was waking up thinking about it. I was checking the clock, when’s it 12 p.m.?” Holland, 27, who hasn’t had a drink in more than a year, shared during the Monday, July 10, episode of the “On Purpose with Jay Shetty” podcast.

The Crowded Room star got concerned when his attempts to stop drinking were unsuccessful, saying, “It just really scared me. I just was like, ‘Wow, maybe I have a little bit of an alcohol thing.’ So I sort of decided to punish myself and say, ‘I’ll do two months off. If I can do two months off, then I can prove to myself that I don’t have a problem.’”

He added: “Two months go by and I was still really struggling. I felt like I couldn’t be social. I felt like I couldn’t go to the pub and have a lime soda. I couldn’t go out for dinner. I was really, really struggling and I started to really worry that maybe I had an alcohol problem.”

Holland recalled setting a goal of six months without consuming alcohol — which became the first step to sobriety.

“I said to myself, ‘If I can do six months without alcohol, then I can prove to myself that I don’t have a problem,’” he continued. “And by the time I got to June [2022], I was the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. I could sleep better. I could handle problems better. Things that would go wrong on set, that would normally set me off, I could take in my stride. I had such better mental clarity. I felt healthier, I felt fitter.”

According to Holland, his decision to quit drinking inspired his mother to follow in his footsteps.

“I am delighted that my mom is loving it — she’s also given it up. She’s loving it, and it’s been amazing,” he noted. “I can’t believe the difference that I feel from not drinking. Yeah, I feel amazing.”

Earlier this year, the Spider-Man star opened up about how his recent role in The Crowded Room influenced his personal life.

“Learning about mental health and the power of it, and speaking to psychiatrists about [the characters] Danny and Billy’s struggles, has been something that has been so informative to my own life,” he told Entertainment Weekly in May about playing an antisocial man arrested after a shooting. “Learning about mental health and the power of it, and speaking to psychiatrists about [the characters] Danny and Billy’s struggles, has been something that has been so informative to my own life.”

Holland also broke down how the heavy subject matter in the Apple TV+ series affected his mental health.

“I’m no stranger to the physical aspects of the job doing the whole action-movie thing. But the mental aspect, it really beat me up and it took a long time for me to recover afterwards, to sort of get back to reality,” he added at the time. “I was seeing myself in him, but in my personal life. I remember having a bit of a meltdown at home and thinking, like, ‘I’m going to shave my head. I need to shave my head because I need to get rid of this character.’ And, obviously, we were mid-shooting, so I decided not to. … It was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before.”