[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+)
