Tom Holland Saved Spider-Man While Drunk During Quiz Night

Rule number one of the bar quiz is no phones. That's non-negotiable. If you can't put your phone down for literally 10 minutes while you try not to snap at your friend who's sure that Ghana's flag doesn't have a star on it?—it does have a star on it, that's why the national football team's called the Black Stars, you moron?—then pub quizzes aren't for you.

However, if you saw a slightly weepy young man popping in and out of your local in Kingston-upon-Thames at some point in the last six months, don't judge him too harshly. It was Tom Holland, trying to stop Spider-Man being booted out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in between the music round and Play Your Cards Right.

"My family and I went to the pub quiz in our local town, and I'm like three pints in, haven’t eaten much and I get a phone call from an unknown number and I have a feeling, I’m like, 'I think this is [Disney CEO] Bob Iger… but I'm drunk,'" Holland told Jimmy Kimmel. "So my dad's like, 'Just take the call, you'll do fine!'"

Spider-Man had looked like he'd be a casualty of the split between Sony and Marvel, being owned by the former and potentially barred from appearing in any follow-ups to Avengers: Endgame.

"I basically just said, 'Thank you for the opportunity', and he said, 'There is a world in which we can make this work' and then there were a bunch of phone calls back and forth."

Then it all got a bit much.

"I weeped," Holland said. No you didn't, Tom. You wept. "I did, yeah. Yeah, no, I was really emotional because I felt like it was all coming to an end... We had a really good plan with what we were going to do with Sony, the future of Spider-Man was still really bright, but it would’ve been a shame to take him out of the MCU, because that's where he belongs."

This story originally appeared on Esquire.co.uk.

* Minor edits have been made by the Esquiremag.ph editors.