Highlights
- Tom Holland thought he bombed his first day filming “The Odyssey”
- IMAX cameras cutting every 3 minutes caused his on-set panic
- Nolan reportedly reassured him with a hug after filming wrapped
Tom Holland is opening up about the moment he was convinced he was doing a downright bad job on his first day filming Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey, and honestly, we get the panic.
The 30-year-old actor, who plays Telemachus in the sprawling epic, told Fandango that he spent his entire first day on set convinced Nolan hated everything he was doing.
“I thought I was totally s—-ing the bed in this scene,” Holland admitted.
The culprit wasn’t his acting. It was IMAX cameras.
“Working with the Imax cameras for the first time is an experience,” Holland explained. “It is unlike anything I have ever seen before, and I didn’t know that it only ran for three minutes.”
Every time Nolan called cut, Holland spiraled a little more. He turned to his co-star and fellow first-timer Jon Bernthal for answers.
“So, I remember you would continue cutting, and I was with Jon, like, ‘Why does he keep cutting? Why does he keep doing that?'” Holland recalled.
In his head, the worst-case scenario was playing on a loop.
“And in my head, I was like, ‘Does he not like what we’re doing? What is happening?'” Holland said.
It took stunt coordinator George Cottle to finally clue him in that the cuts had nothing to do with his performance and everything to do with the technical limits of shooting on IMAX film.
“No, no, no, there’s only three minutes in the mag,” Cottle told him, according to Holland.
“I was like, ‘Oh, thank god,'” Holland said.
The actor called the whole ordeal “one of the most daunting experiences” of his career, especially given the scene was, in his words, one of the most important in his character’s arc. He got some reassurance from Nolan himself once the cameras stopped rolling, with the director reportedly giving him a hug and a pat on the back at the end of the day.
“The Odyssey” marks the first feature film shot entirely on IMAX cameras, and Nolan has called the format an evolution he hopes other filmmakers will embrace. The Homer adaptation follows Matt Damon‘s Odysseus on his long road home to wife Penelope, played by Anne Hathaway, and son Telemachus, played by Holland. The cast also includes Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Elliot Page, Benny Safdie, Mia Goth and John Leguizamo.
The Odyssey hits theaters July 17.
More Photos from the World Premire of The Odyssey in London
