Tom Holland is the boyfriend or husband we’d all love to have. Seeing him on the red carpet with Zendaya—so sweet, thoughtful, and never over the top—it’s almost impossible not to fall in love with him. Anne Hathaway, however, who spent several months with him on the set of The Odyssey, took it a step further, going so far as to describe him not as her dream partner, but as her ideal son.
The actor, already the mother of Jonathan and Jack, announced in late June that she was pregnant with her third child with her husband, Adam Shulman. In Christopher Nolan’s film, she plays Penelope, the mother of Telemachus, played by Holland, and during a promotional interview with New York’s eTalk, she drew parallels between her on-screen role and her real life. “As a mom in real life, I very much hope all of my children grow up to be as wonderful as my onscreen child,” Hathaway said. “Tom is like a dream son.”
The character portrayed by the star of The Devil Wears Prada is the wife of Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, who spends ten years fighting in the Trojan War and another ten trying to return home.
In the epic poem, Penelope was 15 when she gave birth to Telemachus. Hathaway is 13 years older than Holland, and she slipped perfectly into the role. “It was really interesting to kind of translate what the world that I live in and what my idea of being a loving mother is to 3,000 years ago,” she said during a stop on her promotional tour. “There’s no such thing as gentle parenting in ancient Greece! The stakes were really, really high. And there was sometimes a need for her to scare [Telemachus] in order to keep him safe. It just made me grateful that I feel like I have more avenues available to me now.”
“I don’t know what it is to raise a teenage boy,” she added. “My kids are still very young, at least they feel young.”
Despite this, she’s certain: she’d like them to be like Holland when they grow up. In Nolan’s film—which features a stellar cast, including Holland’s wife Zendaya as the goddess Athena—Holland also stars.
The two were married in secret a few months ago. They rarely open up about their private lives, but Zendaya recently shared how it was her husband who wanted to break the news to her that Nolan—her favorite director—had cast her in the film. She was “already on cloud nine” for her husband, “And then he came home and said, ‘I need you to read something.’”
“And I was like, ‘Is it that thing we were just reading the other night?’” she continued. “And he was like [nods head], ‘But now read it thinking of [Athena].’”
A dream come true and the perfect husband.
Originally published in Vanity Fair Italia.