Tom Holland admits negative The Crowded Room reviews were "a kick in the teeth"
"Sometimes there’s a redeeming quality in there," Tom Holland says of reviews of his new Apple TV+ series The Crowded Room. "There was nothing”
If Tom Holland gleans anything from the response to his latest endeavor the Apple TV+ thriller The Crowded Room, perhaps it should be: for every universally beloved viral moment, there’s a prestige streamer series that flops. As Holland candidly recalls in a new interview, negative reviews for the series—which The A.V. Club called “utterly confused”— didn’t exactly roll off him like water off a duck’s back.
“It was a kick in the teeth,” Holland tells The Hollywood Reporter’s Seth Abramovitch. “Rolling over, looking up the reviews, and then all of a sudden I was like, ‘Wow. That’s a bad review.’ Sometimes there’s a redeeming quality in there. There was nothing.”
In her review of the series, The A.V. Club’s own Emma Keates wrote that The Crowded Room “can’t seem to figure out if it wants to be a shocking crime drama or an earnest treatise on the stigmas surrounding mental illness, and as a result, it ends up as neither.” The series has a 31% critical score on Rotten Tomatoes, making it woefully certified rotten.
Although Holland isn’t shy about sharing his disappointment over The Crowded Room’s pans, he’s quick to reframe things in a positive light. “There will be good ones. There will be,” Holland reassures himself. “I try to have a healthy outlook on all that sort of stuff and respect everyone’s opinion.”
Given that Holland is both a Marvel centerpiece and the romantic partner of critical darling Zendaya, taking everyone’s opinion to heart might not be the best medicine. Hopefully, the next time Holland reaches for his phone to scroll through a “crowded room” Google alert, he’ll text the aptly-named “Spider Boys” group chat he reportedly shares with Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire instead.