Over the course of his still relatively fresh career, Tom Holland has built up a reputation for his physicality – as well as a willingness to give up his body for a stunt. His background as a dancer helped him embrace the moves that come with being Spider-Man in the MCU, but even as far back as the tsunami thriller The Impossible, Holland has been enduring brutal set pieces for the good of a blockbuster. So when he’s talking about Uncharted, and he calls a stunt the “hardest” he’s ever done, we don’t write it off as actor speak.
The stunt’s so eye-popping, it has been a centrepiece of the marketing campaign for Ruben Fleischer’s big-screen adaptation of the popular video game, Uncharted. In the sequence, treasure seeker Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) is plummeting through the air, having exited an airplane that’s in motion. Over the course of the stunt, Drake tries to get BACK in the plane, and when I spoke with Holland about the challenges of filming this lengthy and spectacular sequence, he admitted to CinemaBlend:
The plane sequence from this movie is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Just months of hard work, hanging off of these boxes, being pushed and thrown and dragged by wires, and smashed into boxes and falling off of boxes, losing your grip. All of us tore our hands up… you’re hanging on to these ropes, and it gets to a point where you just can’t hang on anymore. You’re trying to! And you let go, and you cut your hands up. We had bangs and bruises and tears all over the place.
I was asking Tom Holland to compare this plane sequence to the one that concludes his first solo Spider-Man movie, Spider-Man: Homecoming. And while it’s likely he did a lot of the stunts required for Homecoming, Uncharted doesn’t have the luxury of hiding Holland’s face behind a mask. So for every move in this lengthy stunt set piece, it has to be the movie’s lead actor… and he takes a beating.
Give this a look:
For this reason, Uncharted warrants a view on the IMAX screen, because in addition to the airplane/crate/skydiving scene, the movie concludes with a spectacular action piece using two pirate ships that are being carried by helicopters. And again, it’s a lot of work for Tom Holland, Mark Wahlberg, and the villains who are trying to kill them as they all hunt for gold. (Even if Zendaya finds them to be very funny.) These are the types of stunts that fans who played the games want to see Nathan Drake do on screen. This all helps Uncharted to become one of the more successful game-to-movie adaptation.
You will be able to find out for yourself when Tom Holland’s Uncharted opens in theaters this weekend. It’s the latest blockbuster reaching multiplexes, and our list of the 2022 Movie Releases will walk you through the rest of the major movies hitting screens this year.
