Another week, another story from us about Tom Holland gushing over girlfriend Zendaya—and we love it. Per Access, Holland is revealing why he is fastidious about keeping his relationship with Zendaya private, speaking on the podcast “On Purpose with Jay Shetty”: “When I feel most myself has to do with my relationship, so I am going to leave that and not talk about that,” he said.
Holland has been on a press tour promoting his new Apple TV+ show, The Crowded Room, and has been more than a little forthcoming with details about his relationship. The two met as costars in the Spider-Man franchise and were publicly linked as a couple for the first time in 2021.
Holland opened up about other topics, too, speaking on his sobriety to Shetty: “I can’t believe the difference that I feel from not drinking,” he said. “I feel amazing.”
His journey to becoming sober, he said, started when he decided to challenge himself to a “dry January,” and kept it going. “By the time I got to June 1 I was the happiest I’d ever been in my entire life,” he said, adding that changing his lifestyle has “honestly been the best thing I’ve ever done.”
While in the midst of getting sober, Holland realized “all I could think about was having a drink,” he said. “I was waking up thinking about it. I was checking the clock…And it just really scared me. Maybe I have a little bit of an alcohol thing. So I sort of decided to punish myself and say, ‘I’ll do February as well. I’ll do two months off.’” He said he was “really struggling” after those two months, which led him to fear that he may have “an alcohol problem,” he said.
And, though a talented actor, Holland said the entertainment industry is “not for me,” despite his love of filmmaking. Per Page Six, Holland told Shetty “Look, I really am a massive fan of making movies, but I really do not like Hollywood. It is not for me. The business really scares me. I understand that I’m a part of that business, and I enjoy my kind of interactions with it.” He added “But that said, I am always looking for ways to kind of remove myself from it, to kind of just live as normal a life as possible.”
Holland—who said that appearing on a podcast was “a very rare thing for me to do,” but that he felt Shetty’s show was a “safe space” for him to be vulnerable—spoke of how some of his friends have “lost themselves” in the entertainment industry, and that he fears he’ll meet the same fate.
“I definitely think it has been an ongoing thought, which is ‘Don’t lose yourself,’” he said. “I’ve seen so many people come before me and lose themselves, and I’ve had friends that I’ve grown up with that aren’t friends of mine anymore because they’ve lost themselves to this business. I just am really, really keen to focus on what makes me happy, which is my family. It’s my friends. It’s my carpentry, my golf, the charity that my mom runs. Like, that is the stuff that makes me really happy, and that’s the stuff that I should protect.”
