Tom Holland Opened Up About the "Eye-Opening Moment" That Made Him Commit to Sobriety

Tom Holland attends the 29th Annual Critics Choice Awards at Barker Hangar on January 14, 2024 in Santa Monica, California — (Image credit: Getty Images)

After more than two years of sobriety, Tom Holland is opening up about his decision to stop drinking.

While promoting his new line of non-alcoholic beers, Bero, in a new interview with Men's Health, the Spider-Man actor opened up about his own decision to ditch alcohol back in January 2022.

Initially, Holland had only planned to take a one-month break from drinking, but once he stopped, he saw what a big part of his life social drinking had become.

“Every Friday after work was a write-off: Let’s get drunk and have a good time. I didn’t have bad experiences, but I would drink enough so that I would ruin my next day,” he explained, apparently adding that the aftereffects of his weekend drinking were intense enough that he talked to his doctor about his liver health.

According to the Men's Health profile, Holland "found his first month of sobriety unsettlingly difficult," and shared that one particular night out with his brother made him decide to commit to a longer stretch of sobriety than he'd initially planned. Although Holland had driven himself and his brother for the poker night they were attending, he felt like he needed a drink to enjoy himself and found himself asking his brother if he would be willing to drive them home so that he could drink—a move that surprised his brother and served as something of a wakeup call for Holland.

“It was a bit of an eye-opening moment for me and for him,” he explained. “It’s really helpful when the people closest to you start going, ‘Are you sure?’”

After that, Holland added a second month to his personal sobriety pledge—and kept adding a month at a time until he reached the six-month mark, when he considered ending his sober streak at his 26th-birthday party, but realized that he wasn't actually interested in drinking again and decided to maintain sober living as a lifestyle.

“I’m quite strong-willed. When I decide to do something, I’m really gonna do it,” he said of his process for going sober. “I leaned on close ones a lot: family, friends, old colleagues, new colleagues, people that reached out that I didn’t know who also were sober.”

The actor recalled one moment when leaning on outside support was particularly helpful. It came early on in his sobriety and he was craving a drink after a difficult week when his lawyer visited him in his hotel with some sober wisdom that really clicked.

“He gave me a really poignant piece of advice that helped me get through everything, which was: You’ll never wake up the morning after a night out and wish you had a drink," Holland said. "That piece of advice really rang true to me, because my problem was that I would have one drink and be fine, and then I would just go too far.”

TOPICS

Kayleigh Roberts is a freelance writer and editor with over 10 years of professional experience covering entertainment of all genres, from new movie and TV releases to nostalgia, and celebrity news. Her byline has appeared in Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar, The Atlantic, Allure, Entertainment Weekly, MTV, Bustle, Refinery29, Girls’ Life Magazine, Just Jared, and Tiger Beat, among other publications. She's a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.