Tom Holland Under Fire for Allegedly Revealing Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey Ending

If there’s one thing you can count on in the world of modern movie promotion, it’s Tom Holland managing to spill a bit more than the studio probably intended. This is the bloke, after all, who once blurted out 'I’m alive!' to a cinema full of punters who hadn’t yet seen Avengers: Infinity War. For the past ten years, Holland’s basically been Hollywood’s most entertaining liability – and this week, people reckon he’s back at it with Christopher Nolan’s mega-ambitious adaptation of The Odyssey.

The accusation did the rounds after a post on X (formerly Twitter) claimed Holland had gone and leaked a good nine-minute chunk from the finale of the film. The story goes: some hawk-eyed viewers caught it in a clip from a new GQ interview – only for that bit to vanish online shortly after (though, just to be clear, the full interview’s still easy enough to find). The movie in question is Nolan’s The Odyssey and, amusingly, the thing he’s apparently spoiled is a story people have had access to for the better part of three millennia. No one’s exactly struggling to find out how Odysseus gets home, let’s be honest.

Nolan, Secrets, and the Cast List of Dreams

The Odyssey drops into IMAX on 17 July. Nolan’s gone for broke here: it’s not only the first narrative film shot entirely in IMAX, it’s tops out at 172 minutes and cost a reported $250 million. Talk about making a statement. You’ve got Matt Damon as Odysseus himself, Holland playing his son Telemachus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Charlize Theron as Calypso, and Robert Pattinson chewing scenery as the suitor Antinous. On top of that, there’s Lupita Nyong'o, Zendaya, Jon Bernthal, and Elliot Page turning up in various mythological costumes. An embarrassment of riches isn’t putting it mildly.

• Matt Damon: Odysseus
• Tom Holland: Telemachus
• Anne Hathaway: Penelope
• Charlize Theron: Calypso
• Robert Pattinson: Antinous
• Lupita Nyong'o, Zendaya, Jon Bernthal, Elliot Page: roles not fully revealed

Nolan’s famous for keeping things under wraps to the point of comedy – actors reading scripts in strictly supervised rooms, plot details under literal lock and key. Universal aren’t daft either; despite some pretty sprawling trailers, they’ve managed to keep most actual story specifics quiet, and are leaning into the big mythological moments instead: Trojan horse, a proper Cyclops, the nightmare of Charybdis. With that sort of background, the mere suggestion of Holland giving away the ending, however accidental, was always going to make waves – especially on a set this obsessively guarded.

Classic Holland Behaviour

If you followed his MCU off-screen antics, you’ll know Holland’s got form. Spoilers have tripped off his tongue before – the time he broke the news of Spider-Man getting sequels (before Marvel had bothered to tell anyone), giving away death scenes, or just riffing through the plot in front of press on the other side of the world. Marvel’s workaround? Give him scripts with lines blacked out, or just sit him next to Benedict Cumberbatch to run interference when he got carried away. There were bets on whether working with Nolan would cure him of his spoiler-happy reflexes.

Recently, he’s been banging the drum for The Odyssey, calling it 'the job of a lifetime' and hyping Nolan’s script as the best he’s read (although you’d hope so for that chunk of budget). In truth though, the real risk of spoilers here might be a bit overblown – it’s Homer who technically got in first, and if you’re desperate to know how Telemachus and his dad sort things out, the ancient text is waiting for you. Mind you, going by the trailers (with Anne Hathaway’s Penelope brooding that 'that world is gone' and everything feeling a bit off-kilter at Ithaca), it looks like Nolan’s taken enough liberties with the ending to keep fans on their toes until July.