Actor Tom Holland’s Gay Sex Scene Sparks Controversy
Shocking no one, the Spider-Man star’s same-sex sex scene in The Crowded Room draws vitriol from online trolls.
Actor Tom Holland, famous for lip syncing to the Rihanna song “Umbrella,” has done it again.
Well, sort of. The actor who portrays Peter Parker wasn’t wearing a wig, corset, and fishnets and grinding on fellow actor and singer Zendaya, his Spider-Man co-star and now girlfriend, in the pouring rain, as he was on the TV show Lip Sync Battle six years ago.
This time, in the latest installment of the new miniseries The Crowded Room, Holland is wearing thick black eyeliner and hooks up with another man in the bathroom stall of a nightclub.
Naturally, the steamy scene, in which Holland bottoms, has gone viral on Twitter — and elicited homophobic backlash. While many fans celebrated Holland for his versatile and “brilliant” lead performance, some trolls tweeted critical remarks like: “Tom Gone Wrong #NotMySpiderMan.”
Fans were quick to defend the actor, noting that other Spidies, namely Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire, have also gone gay for pay. One wrote: “The people posting ‘not my spiderman’ about tom holland because of his gay scene like… honey i have some news for you.”
the people posting “‘not my spiderman” about tom holland because of his gay scene like… honey i have some news for you pic.twitter.com/hcgXjeUOR7
— berry (@sckberry) July 15, 2023
Another fan tweeted: “Oh honey, you realise that he’s an ACTOR, right? He’s not ACTUALLY Spider-Man. He can take any roles he wants, yes, including queer ones. Now breathe deeply and touch some grass.”
Watching fragile cishet men have breakdowns over the reason Tom Holland is trending is sweet wine to me. Oh honey, you realize that he's an ACTOR, right? He's not ACTUALLY Spiderman. He can take any roles he wants, yes, including queer ones. Now breathe deeply & touch some grass.
— Theo Foxx (@FoxxDoesThings) July 14, 2023
Despite an outpouring of support for Holland from the LGBTQ community, whether straight, cisgender actors should take queer roles has been hotly debated.
“In a perfect world, gay actors can play gay roles and gay actors can play straight roles, and straight actors can play straight roles and play gay roles,” Billy Eichner, director of Bros, the first gay rom-com from a major Hollywood studio, told People in 2019, “and we’re all mixing and matching because part of the fun and the challenge of being an actor or an actress is to play someone who you’re not.”
For Holland, shooting for the psychological thriller was so challenging that he decided to take a year-long break from acting. “The show did break me,” he told Extra.
The Crowded Room is based on a harrowing true crime story, in which Holland’s character, the lead Danny Sullivan, commits a heinous crime, but is later revealed to be suffering from dissociative identity disorder.
Sullivan’s personality, or alter, Ariana, a woman, is in control during the polarizing sex scene.
One wonders whether Holland sees the scene as groundbreaking. When asked about his iconic performance on Lip Sync Battle, he told The Hollywood Reporter: “I’ve grown up in the most non-toxic-masculine environment possible.”
“I didn’t realize what I was doing was so forward-thinking,” he added.
The ninth and penultimate episode of The Crowded Room will be released on July 21.
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