Tom Holland Reveals LEGOs Were a Childhood Bonding Experience,Fondly Recalls Building Death Star with Jacob Batalon
LOS ANGELES – Spider-Man star Tom holland discussed his lifelong connection to LEGO,revealing it was a key part of his childhood and a memorable experience during the making of Spider-Man: Homecoming,in a new interview with IGN coinciding with the release of a new LEGO short film.
Holland and his brother Sam grew up playing LEGO video games,specifically citing LEGO Wars as one of the first co-op games they owned. “A lot of our childhood was spent with massive arguments about whose turn it was to play the Xbox,” Holland explained. “So when we got [those] it was like, ‘oh wow, we can play this simultaneously occurring.’ And we’re very competitive as brothers. So rivalries were born on the LEGO battlefield, shall we say.”
Sam Holland highlighted the importance of physical LEGO sets as a counterpoint to increasing screen time. “In a world where we’re surrounded by screens, it gets people off screens, it gets people talking to one another,” he said. “Growing up, I remember building all sorts of things.” Tom jokingly added, “It also teaches you about tidying up, because if you don’t tidy up Lego, it can be hazardous for yoru parents’ bare feet.”
Holland’s gratitude for LEGO dates back further, as evidenced by a 2016 IGN interview where he masterfully re-enacted Spider-Man: Homecoming’s bank heist scene using a LEGO set. while he admitted he no longer collects minifigures of himself, Holland shared his fondest LEGO memory involved building a LEGO Star Wars death Star with his Homecoming co-star Jacob Batalon, who plays Ned Leeds.
“I think my favorite memory of LEGO would be spider-Man: Homecoming,” Holland recalled. “Jacob and I were becoming fast friends and our lives were being flipped upside down. And there’s that fantastic scene where Ned drops the LEGO Death Star and we were tasked by the studio to build one ourselves.”
Holland explained the studio needed the set to break in a specific way for the film, requiring a modified build. “They built it without some of its infrastructure so that it would shatter better,” he said. “But I remember that being a very, very poignant and fantastic time in that process… sitting down with Jacob in my house, getting to know each other at the very beginning of this crazy journey.” The scene depicts Ned discovering Peter Parker’s identity as Spider-Man, resulting in the 3,803-brick death Star set being dropped and destroyed.
