Key points
Tom Holland said that the fishnets he wore on Lip Sync Battle belonged to his grandmother.
The Spider-Man: Homecoming star said that his father advised against his performance of Rihanna’s “Umbrella.”
Holland said that Zendaya was blindsided by the scope of his performance on the show.
Tom Holland is looking back on his most iconic performance — and it’s not Spider-Man.
The Cherry star spoke with Gordon Ramsay on a recent episode of his show Scrambled and revealed new details about his viral Lip Sync Battle performance of Rihanna’s “Umbrella” from 2017.
Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty
Tom Holland on ‘The Tonight Show’ on Oct. 22, 2024
“What was really great about that is people didn’t know that I could dance,” Holland said of the performance, which began with a fake-out intro featuring “Singin’ in the Rain” before jumping into Rihanna’s 2007 single. “I kept that quiet, I don’t know why. And I came out with a bang.”
The actor said that he initially reached an agreement with his LSB opponent and Spider-Man: Homecoming costar Zendaya (to whom he is now engaged) to keep their face-off low-key.
“It’s so funny, Zendaya and I, we were chatting at the time about what we were gonna do, and we had agreed that we would take it easy,” he explained. “That was the agreement, that it was like, ‘I’m not gonna do anything crazy, you’re not gonna do anything crazy, we’re just gonna keep it nice and easy breezy.'”
However, Holland’s choreography gradually evolved into something grander as he continued preparing for the show.
“When I was working with the creative team coming up with the ideas, they kind of pitched this ‘Umbrella’ thing, and as we were rehearsing, it got crazier and crazier,” he told Ramsay. “And then the rain machine came in. And then I was like, ‘F— it, I wanna wear fishnets and do this, and I want a wig and a quick-change.'”
Lip Sync Battle/YouTube
Tom Holland on ‘Lip Sync Battle’ in 2017
Ramsay chimed in, “Were they mum’s fishnets?”
Holland responded, “They were my granny’s, actually.”
The actor also said that his father, director Dominic Holland, wasn’t thrilled about the performance. “When I told my dad, he was like, ‘Son, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I don’t think you should do that,'” Holland explained. “I think he was just, at that time in my career, he was very worried about me becoming too famous too quickly. So he was really keen for me to not do extra TV shows that I didn’t have to do to try and maintain that part of my childhood.”
Holland finds the LSB video’s continued viral success “ridiculous,” especially considering its relative popularity in his full filmography.
“Honestly, of all the pieces of work I’ve done, that I’ve put my heart and soul into, blood, sweat, and tears, the Lip Sync Battle is the thing that everyone brings up,” the actor said. “It’s never Spider-Man, it’s never any of my other movies, it’s always Lip Sync Battle. It haunts me.”
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Watch Holland’s full conversation with Ramsay above.
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