Spider-Man: Far From Home will arrive on July 2. As a result, there can’t be enough Tom Holland quotes floating around right now, and this week, he visited The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where he surprisingly didn’t fall into his infamous habit of spoiling the MCU. Holland did, however, reveal that it never pays to try and keep up with the Oscar-nominated Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays Quentin Beck/Mysterio alongside Holland’s Peter Parker/Spidey in this film. The latter revealed to Colbert that the two recently toured China, where Gyllenhall invited him to the gym, and the trouble began (as revealed at the 5:00 min mark above).
Holland, of course, knew he was in trouble after receiving his co-star’s invite “[b]ecause Jake Gyllenhaal’s ripped, right? And I’m really competitive.” He didn’t even want to go to the gym but couldn’t stop himself, and then after a series of exhausting strength training exercises, Gyllenhaal suggested a “warm up” on the treadmill. Well, Holland couldn’t refrain from running himself into the ground in an effort to save face:
“[H]e goes: we’ll do a quick mile. I’m like, a mile? Are we pressed for time? Come on, let’s do two. So immediately I’m regretting suggesting two miles. We set off, we start running. And there’s a law in the gym, that you can’t run slower than the guy next to you. You just can’t. So I’m running next to him, two minutes in I’ve got a stitch, I’m wishing everything was over, but I’m saying ‘there’s nothing that’s going to get me off this treadmill. I will beat Jake Gyllenhaal in this race.’ And then three or four minutes in he says ‘Tom, this is too easy, let’s up the incline.'”
From there, the two co-stars ended up passive-aggressively goading each other into an unspoken competition, and soon enough, they were blazing away at a 4.0 incline. Holland confessed that soreness had already settled in later that day, and he couldn’t even walk. “I’m sitting there and a journalist says ‘what’s wrong with you,'” he explained. “[A]nd I said, ‘Well I do all of my own stunts.'”
The moral of the story? Just let Jake Gyllenhaal win because that’s gonna happen regardless.