Tom Holland is the middle school boy we all had a crush on in this interview from 2009
Tom Holland may be your latest crush, due to his star turn in Spider-Man: Homecoming (or maybe it occurred a bit earlier during his Lip Sync Battle performance to Rihanna’s “Umbrella”), but let’s turn back time to when Holland was an even more fresh-faced kid in London. Back in the day, Holland starred as Billy Elliot in the West End musical, and Mashable has brought our attention to an utterly adorable video of him as a child talking about his experience. Get ready for your heart to soar higher than Spider-Man ever could after watching this vid.
According to TheSkyKid.com’s page on Billy Elliot, Holland performed as Billy Elliot from September 2008 to May 2010. The below video is from 2009, and the 13-year-old Holland explains how it took two and a half years for him to eventually sing and dance as the title character.
Yet, the biggest takeaway just may be how incredibly cute wee Spider-Man Holland is in this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-omDVx5IEl4?feature=oembed
Besides showing his dedication to performing at such a young age, Holland also seems to be a completely normal kid (you know, who just happens to be starring in a West End show) in the video. His genuine excitement talking about the show — including the fun of doing acrobatics, the “rude words,” and the amazement at looking out into the audience (which makes him feel “proper happy”) — is honestly too precious for us to handle.
After seeing his moves as Billy Elliot, you can totally see how he transferred those acrobatics to his Spider-Man stunts …
… and how he used those dance skills to crush his Lip Sync Battle performance.
Along with showing off those backflips Holland learned from being in Billy Elliot, on Instagram, he has been giving love to his first major role throughout the years on social media.
If you understandably want more of Holland as Billy Elliot, we recommend going down an internet wormhole to find videos of him performing as a boy. Holland himself even encourages it, since he retweeted the below tweet of him performing with Dean-Charles Chapman (better known as Tommen Baratheon from Game of Thrones) in 2010, for the British daytime show The Alan Titchmarsh Show.
Peter Parker And Tommen Baratheon Dancing Together When They Were Small Is So Adorable #SpiderManHomecoming https://t.co/HFqfMqUAXT pic.twitter.com/Yz3pYVQnTk
— 9GAG.TV (@9gagtv) July 7, 2017
(And here’s the video of the performance, since it would be cruel not to show it to you.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mY-0tg8oo8?feature=oembed
So when you go see Spider-Man: Homecoming, whether it’s for the first or tenth time, remember how endearing Holland was in his first role and be “proper happy” about how far that little kid has come.
