BORN TO BE SPIDEY!

Reluctantly famous Tom Holland has played the superhero for six years and he’s back in the latest blockbuster

- ROBYN LUCAS

HE’S always had a knack for entertaining. He was dancing along to Janet Jackson songs when he was still in nappies and was 12 when he made his stage debut in Billy Elliot the Musical.

But not even Tom Holland could have foreseen that he’d play one of the biggest superheroes of all time – Spider-Man, the amazing part-human, part-arachnid whose mission it is to rid the world of crime.

And Tom (25) has gone on to make history too: he’s been playing Spidey for six years, becoming the longest-serving actor to bring the beloved Marvel Comics character to the screen.

He also won the Bafta rising star award in 2017 and has seen his net worth grow to over $18 million (R279m).

Tom is back now in Spider-Man: No Way Home, battling aliens and supervillain with his wonderful webs and superhuman skills.

The actor’s first turn at Spidey came when he was cast in Captain America: Civil War when he was just 19 and he received the news that he’d bagged the role in a rather unusual way – by scrolling through news sites on the internet.

“I broke my computer because I flipped it up in the air,” he recalls. “It fell off my bed, my dog went nuts. I ran downstairs. I was telling my family, ‘I got the part, I got the part!’

“I was going ballistic. That was right about the time Sony had been hacked so my brother Harry, who’s quite tech-savvy, was like, ‘No, there’s no way that’s real. They would’ve called you. They’ve been hacked’. Then the studio did call me and gave me the news.”