How Spider-Man actor Tom Holland has been on a sobriety journey of 4.5 years after being "addicted to alcohol"

Spider-Man actor Tom Holland quit drinking in January 2022, after a Dry January challenge that year turned into something longer. By this June, that put him at roughly four and a half years sober.

The trigger, by his account, was ordinary. He described a heavily boozy Christmas the year before, then decided to try a month off. By partway through, he says, drinking was all he could think about, which is what first made him suspect a problem. He extended the break, then set himself a deadline: stay off alcohol until his birthday, June 1, 2022.

The first year

He's said that by that June 1 deadline, he was sleeping better, handling on-set problems with more ease, and felt physically fitter than he had in years. But he's also been consistent about the year not being simple. He called that first year "the toughest challenge that I've ever been on" on a recent podcast interview with Amy Poehler. Much of the difficulty, he's said, was social rather than physical: he described struggling to go to the pub, go out for dinner, or feel like he could be social at all without a drink.

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He's also described what the drinking itself looked like before he quit, and it wasn't the version people tend to assume. His version of "wild" wasn't nightclubs; it was finishing a hotel minibar alone and going to work the next day. He has even named a specific instance: he emptied the minibar the night before his first screen test opposite Robert Downey Jr., and Marvel found out about it.

He's said the drinking didn't come from crisis so much as it interfered quietly and that he isn't sure his recent career growth would have happened had he kept at it.

Why he started a beer company

The gap he kept running into during that first sober year, he's said, was practical: there wasn't much on offer for someone who wanted to be out without drinking. During that period he noticed limited options for people who wanted to be part of the social experience at a bar without standing out as the one person on lemonade. That gap became Bero, his non-alcoholic beer brand, launched in October 2024.

Zendaya factors into the business too. He's said she has never been much of a drinker, which is what led Bero to develop a shandy, a mix of the beer with lemonade, so she could take part in the same round.

Why it's landing the way it is

Part of why Holland's version of this story gets attention is the timing of it. He was 25 when he decided to stop drinking, in the middle of the biggest run of his career, at an age when going out is still treated as part of the job of being famous. Sobriety at that stage of a public life runs against a fairly specific kind of pressure: the assumption that turning down a drink at 25, in rooms full of industry people, reads as awkward, uptight, or a mood-killer.

He's addressed that pressure directly rather than skipping past it. He's said outright that he felt he couldn't be social without a drink in hand, that going to the pub or out for dinner without one felt difficult specifically because of how central drinking is to British social life. That's a fairly unusual thing for a young actor at his level of visibility to put on record, since the easier move is to keep it vague or private.

The most recent development came this week, in an interview with French outlet Brut. Holland got emotional on camera after a journalist told him that her father had gotten sober after watching Holland's 2023 interview about his own addiction, and he thanked her for passing the message on. That's not something Holland can take credit for engineering. It's a fairly direct measure of what happens when someone with that kind of platform talks about the mechanics of quitting instead of just the fact of having quit.

The first year was hard, the reasons were ordinary, and Holland has stayed open about both, even at the height of back-to-back blockbuster press cycles for The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. That consistency, across four years and dozens of interviews, is what keeps making the story land for people going through the same thing.