Tom Holland shows his creative range in 'Cherry'

It only spans a few years, but dark comedy Cherry covers college romance, war, PTSD, opioid addiction and a crime spree.

Tom Holland plays the title role in the movie about self-sabotage, and admits he’s working on being more deliberate about choices in his own life.

"I am a very impulsive person,” he said. “I'm getting much better at thinking before I say things and thinking before I do things, because I can get myself into trouble."
Over the years he has gotten in trouble as the face of Spider-Man, for accidentally spoiling plot points in his Marvel films.
Cherry has little in common with big tent comic book movies - aside from the directors, Anthony and Joe Russo. They approached this smaller, surreal dark comedy with the same care they do a blockbuster.

It was also personal to them. Their sister wrote the screenplay and they shot on location at many places from their childhoods in Cleveland. The humor harkens back to their work on Arrested Development – it’s often in the background, on signs and nameplates.

“It's a layered and dense movie, there's weird cameos in there, there's a Spider-Man reference,” Joe said. "We like for people to be able to watch a story and find something different every time they watch it."
They also liked to push their star, creatively - whether he was robbing banks or acting in a scene where he had to do the robot.

"You always talk about how you need to trust your directors and the directors need to trust the actors, and I trust the Russos, I really do,” Holland said. "But when we were shooting the basic training portion of the film and they were trying to get me to do the robot in front of all these people, I remember taking them aside and saying, 'Guys, this is one step too far now'… but then when you watch the film it really works."

Despite the movie’s absurdity and action, its backbone is a love story between Holland and Ciara Bravo.

“It felt very natural, the chemistry,” she said. “But we had about two weeks to get to know each other before we started filming, which in the moviemaking business is an absolute luxury, it's very rare that you get that much time."

It was time well spent. Cherry is an inventive, engrossing movie that strikes the balance between drama, comedy, and things we've never seen before.

It begins streaming on Apple TV+ March 12.


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[-mekug]

Wait...there is a spider man reference?