‘Please make it stop’: Tom Hollander and the bizarre world of mistaken celebrity identity

This week, during a taping of Late Night with Seth Meyers, the actor Tom Hollander casually unveiled what might be the greatest talkshow anecdote ever told. After a few minutes of halting, self-conscious promotion for his new Truman Capote show, during which he barely made eye contact with anyone, he opened up.

Asked if he was sick of people confusing him for Tom Holland, he started unloading a story about a time he felt particularly flush, visiting a friend in a theatre and deliberately not trying to lord his television earnings over him, when he mistakenly received an email from his agent. Labelled “box office bonus for The Avengers”, the email’s intended target was Tom Holland. Hollander opened it. “It was an astonishing amount of money,” he told Meyers. “It was not his salary. It was his first box office bonus. Not the whole box office bonus. The first one. And it was more money than I’d ever seen. It was a seven-figure sum.”

It’s a wonderful story. It’s gossipy and insidery. It puts Hollander squarely in the realm of the plucky underdog. And it’s a nice little insight into the world where there are too many famous Toms with similar surnames.

Hollander isn’t the only Tom to have found himself sucked into the gravitational pull of Spider-Man. There is another Tom Holland, the author and historian. Like Hollander, he had a perfectly decent career pre-Avengers. Say “Tom Holland” to someone a decade ago and they might have replied: “Ah yes, I enjoyed his BBC Four documentary about the impact that fossils had on global mythology.” But those days are long gone. Say “Tom Holland” now and people just whoop and make thwippy noises with their mouths.

If this was a struggle for the OG Holland, he managed to keep it largely to himself. And then, last year, the Spider-Man Tom Holland went to India, posed for a picture, and the entire population of the subcontinent reacted by mistakenly tagging historian Holland in a tweet. “Please make it stop,” he whimpered as his mentions were deluged.

Of course, this also happens to other people. There are two Brian Coxes, for instance: one a physicist, the other an actor. During a particularly brain-melting episode of BBC Breakfast in 2022, both Coxes appeared on screen at the same time, simultaneously promoting a documentary about wealth inequality and a book about black holes. During the appearance, the pair of Brians revealed that they often turn up at events where the other Brian was expected. Once, science Brian said, they both stayed in the same hotel, and the receptionist told him to pick a new name because their system couldn’t handle two bookings for Brian Cox at once.

Succession does seem to have a stranglehold on this sort of mix-up. My son’s favourite children’s author, to my eternal chagrin, is Jeremy Strong, who has written a very good series of books about bums. He is not to be confused with the wildly method Succession actor Jeremy Strong, but that hasn’t stopped the world from telling book Jeremy how good he is on their favourite HBO prestige drama. Intermittently, book Jeremy is forced to respond to well-wishers with an extraordinary level of patience. “Sorry, but I’m not the US actor,” he will write on social media several times a year. “I’m a British author of children’s books.” It must be galling.

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However, there is now a precedent for when this sort of mix-up happens. For years, a mild-mannered X user named John Lewis would find his Novembers and Decembers ruined by an onslaught of public confusion whenever the department store of the same name released a new Christmas advert. Knowing a good PR move when they saw it, shop John Lewis reached out to John Lewis the guy and started sending him gifts to make up for the inconvenience of sharing a name with a much more famous entity. It seems clear that this is what must happen now. Whenever Tom Holland makes a new Marvel movie, he should split his salary into three and share it with the other two Toms who live in his shadow. It seems only fair, after all.