[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for The Crowded Room, Season 1 Episode 7, “The Crowded Room.”]
Tom Holland is grateful, during a recent press day prior to the premiere of The Crowded Room, to be able to talk about the show’s biggest twists. “It’s been really difficult, you know, because the show is so much about those spoilers,” he tells Consequence. “And I really want to talk about those aspects of the show because I’m really proud of what we achieved — I’m really proud of the message and I’m excited for people to understand what it is that we’re trying to put down. So it has been really difficult to keep those things a secret.”
The reason for secrecy is that The Crowded Room is all built around one massive reveal in Episode 7, “The Crowded Room.” Up to this point, the series has delved into the present and past of Danny Sullivan (Holland), a young man in 1979 New York who’s gotten into a bit of a legal pickle, after firing a gun into a crowd. For most of that time, we’ve been led to believe that Danny might be a serial killer (a relatively new concept for 1979) — he’s certainly having a lot of conversations with a psychologist (Amanda Seyfried) while in custody, and his life story is full of wild characters who no longer are present.
However, the actual twist is that Danny’s not a serial killer; instead, he suffers from dissociative identity disorder, or as it was known early on, multiple personalities. It’s something that viewers might have been able to predict thanks to the involvement of executive producer Akiva Goldsman, who won an Oscar for writing A Beautiful Mind — the 2001 Russell Crowe starrer also hinged around a similar reveal.
The Crowded Room, though, really embeds viewers in Danny’s wild internal narrative, before pulling back the curtain to reveal the truth of his reality, as well as the deep trauma which brought him to this point. “I just found it really interesting — the amazing lengths that we can go to in order to survive, how the human mind can be so powerful and act for the greater good, but also sometimes act for the worst ways possible,” Holland says.
Also, he adds, “it was not something I’d ever tapped into before — mimicking other fantastic actors doing great performances, and trying to bring that to life and working with them because you are sharing a character. That’s a really unique experience.”
With the reveal of Danny’s many facets in Episode 7, Holland’s performance in the series really ratchets up to a new degree, as we get to see him not just embodying Danny, but several of the other characters we’ve met up until this point — now revealed to be “alters.”
The Crowded Room (Apple TV+)
“It was great,” Sasha Lane says about working with Holland — both as a scene partner, and as a sort of collaborator, as she plays Ariana, ultimately revealed to be one of Danny’s alters. “I think we had a nice groove. I had a lot of respect for the amount of work he had to take on and being able to watch him in his zone and being able to feed off of that.”
When the project came her way, Lane says that she knew that she would essentially be playing one of Danny’s alters, “but at the same time, there was a really big focus on Ariana still being an individual. Regardless of if she’s real or not, she feels real and we want her to feel real and she sees herself as being real.”
Lane adds that it was “kind of trippy” to see the ways in which Holland “picked up on my little quirks and mannerisms, without me knowing that he was watching me do that. You’re kind of feeling called out. You’re like, ‘That’s exactly how I sit.’ Or like, ‘Oh my God, he’s doing my little like nervous hand thing.'”
Holland says that his favorite alter to play was aspiring magician Jonny, embodied on screen by Levon Hawke. “I think Levon did such a good job of portraying Jonny in a way that only Levon could have done. No one could have asked him to portray him in that way. It was so organic and it was so unique that I really loved playing him. I hope that, you know, all of the actors that play my altars will see my interpretation of their character and and think that I did a good job. I think that I did, but we’ll have to wait and see. But they all did really well. I’m really proud of them all.”
Emmy Rossum, who plays Danny’s mother Candy, says that “The places that he was asked to go and the creativity and imagination that he used to do that, I thought was really impressive — a real fearlessness of spirit. Both he and Amanda felt like very safe scene partners with very, very challenging material.”
Rossum related deeply to the material as a young mother herself, saying that “I often worry about the blind spots that I could have, the ways in which even with the best of intentions, I could hurt the people that I love the most. It brought up very real things for me — certainly playing ultimately the acknowledgement of all those secrets, and the acknowledgement of living in denial in order to survive. How do we know things but not know them at the same time? Because the very conscious state of knowing those things would be so unsettling that we couldn’t possibly live with ourselves or the lives that we have built. And so we can’t know them, so they can’t be true, so they aren’t true.”
Continues Rossum, “I thought that was really interesting. The ways in which we try to protect each other by being dishonest with each other and sometimes being dishonest with ourselves. I thought it was so deep and resonant and the more that we learned about these characters, the greater empathy I was able to find for them.”
The Crowded Room has not been a critical favorite since its premiere, but Holland remains proud of the show — and if nothing else, his performance is an impressive achievement. In our interview, he says that looking forward, “I’m going to really struggle to find something that is as challenging as this — there is nothing quite like this role. It was incredibly daunting at the time and now it’s very daunting, putting it out there, which is why I’m so excited about it. I’m going to try and find something that challenges me more than this, but I think I’ll struggle.”
New episodes of The Crowded Room drop Fridays on Apple TV+.