Tom Holland’s Prep For Spider-Man Shirtless Bathhouse Scene Left Him ‘Grumpy’

This article contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

In Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Tom’s character Peter Parker appears shirtless in a number of sequences – but there’s one scene in particular that has really captured the internet’s attention, in which he attends a bathhouse, sporting just his superhero mask and a towel.

During a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Tom was asked about what it was like to shoot the scene in question, which featured fellow Brit Florence Pugh in a cameo role as her Marvel character Yelena Belova.

“Besides absolutely loving working with Florence and the scene going incredibly smoothly and her being the funniest person in the room, I had tried to do that stupid dehydration thing for that scene,” he admitted, referring to a controversial technique employed by several actors, in which they deprive themselves of water before filming a shirtless scene to enhance the way their muscles appear on screen.

Naturally, this is something that medical professionals have long advised against, due to the health issues relating to dehydration, which the NHS has said can make people “seriously ill” and even lead to kidney issues.

“I tried to see if it would make a difference, and the only thing it did is it just made me really grumpy,” Tom lamented. “I don’t even think it really made that much of a difference.”

Tom previously told the podcast Dish that depriving himself of water on the set of Spider-Man: Brand New Day “didn’t do any of” what he’d hoped, instead leaving him simply “pissed off” because of how thirsty he was.

Currently, Tom and his wife Zendaya can both be seen in action in two of the summer’s biggest blockbuster, Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Christopher Nolan’s hugely popular adaptation of The Odyssey.