If you need a ride, Tom Holland would probably be more than happy to help. The actor has been sober since January 1, 2022, and after worrying that he wouldn’t be able to have a social life without booze, is now the happiest he’s ever been, he said in a lengthy conversation on Jay Shetty’s podcast.
“I love being the designated driver,” he gushed in the episode, posted Monday. “I love being that person that makes sure that everyone gets home. I like being a dependable person.”
Holland had previously revealed that he kicked alcohol while filming The Crowded Room, and has now gone in depth on his personal sobriety journey. In fact, he didn’t intend to have a sobriety journey at all, he just tried out Dry January.
“I didn’t one day wake up and say, ‘I’m giving up drinking.’” the 27-year-old said. “I just, like many Brits, had had a very, very boozy December, Christmastime, I was on vacation, I was drinking a lot. I’ve always been able to drink a lot, I think I got my genes from my mum’s side in that thing, that I can drink.”
But as time went by, he realized that it wasn’t just that he could drink.
“All I could think about was having a drink,” he said. “It was all I could think about. I was waking up thinking about it, I was checking the clock, when’s it 12, and it just really scared me. I just was like wow, maybe I have a little bit of an alcohol thing, so I sort of decided to punish myself and say, ‘I’ll do February as well, I’ll do two months off. If I can do two months off, then I can prove to myself I don’t have a problem.’”
When he realized that he was “still really struggling,” that two months became six, setting himself a deadline of his birthday, June 1.
“By the time I had got to June 1, I was the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life,” he said. “I could sleep better, I could handle problems better. Things that would happen on set that would normally set me off, I could take in my stride. I had such better mental clarity, I felt healthier, I felt fitter, and I just sort of said to myself, why am I so enslaved to this drink, why am I so obsessed with the idea of having this drink?”
A year after that realization, he calls getting sober “the best thing I’ve ever done.”
His biggest worry, he said, was not being able to go out with his friends and not drink, but said that his pals have been supportive. The obstacle, he said, was himself. After hiding away from social situations, he said, he came out of hiding and realized “if you’re only enjoying yourself because you’re drinking, then you really do have a problem.”
His family has also been supportive, with his mother also quitting drinking as well. “She’s loving it,” he said.
While Holland does say that he’s “over the moon to be sober,” don’t expect him to go evangelizing any time soon. “If I can encourage someone to drink less, then that’s great, but I don’t want to start getting into the world of ‘you need to stop drinking,’ because it’s just not for me to say,” he said.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves in canonizing him—there’s a touch of earned smugness there, proof that the man who brought us the most revolutionary Rihanna choreography of all time is human after all: “I love seeing my friends on the golf course at 8 a.m. in the morning, feeling fresh and ready to go, and they’re sort of crawling out of their car.”
