Tom Holland, not the actor, in Long Beach with his neighbor’s dog, Sweet Dee Wasper. Photo courtesy of Thom Wasper.
Perhaps you’ve heard of my friend Tom Holland. He’s sort of a renaissance guy; talented in a lot of areas.
As a performer, he’s maybe best known as the vocalist and frontman of the lounge act lovingkindness, a band that’s been around since the days of System M, the Blue Cafe and Bogarts (where Holland also worked as a talent buyer and DJ).
As a smart guy, he handles just about anything having to do with technology for the National Academies of Sciences’ Beckman Center in Irvine.
His email is terrific. Sometimes he gets three or four messages a day telling him how cute he is, or how much the sender adores him. His invariably youthful fans are particularly fond, it seems, of his fine work as Spider-Man in “Captain America: Civil War,” “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and “Avengers: Infinity War.”
Yeah, well, but that’s a whole different Tom Holland. Our Tom Holland doesn’t appear in movies and, in fact, has never seen the fake Tom Holland, the moving-picture star, in anything since the young British actor’s earliest work in the tsunami story, “The Impossible.”
“I get a little sick of the messages,” he says now. “I usually delete them right away.”
Because Holland has always been in front of the latest technology, he was among the first Gmail users and was able to snag the email address of tomholland@gmail, without having to append anything exotic to it, like numbers.
“I thought it would be cool, but it’s not,” said Holland. “Because I not only get the movie guy’s mail, but I get mail for all the Tom Hollands. I never knew there were so many Tom Hollands.”
According to the Census Bureau, there are 71 Tom Hollands in the country. One of them is a film director who did “Child’s Play” and “Fright Night.” “There’s a video of him saying how he thinks it’s cool to be confused with the actor Tom Holland,” said Holland. “But he probably doesn’t get his email.”