What can we say? People loved Spider-Man: No Way Home, and one of the big reasons for that is the central performance by a certain Tom Holland, who almost took home this prize last year. Of course, Holland also expanded his range further with a gritty drama (Cherry) and a sci-fi thriller (Chaos Walking) in 2021, but come on. It was No Way Home.
If you’re one of the apparently few people who didn’t see the latest Spider-Man flick, you may want to stop reading here (that’s a spoiler warning), because while Tom Holland ultimately secured a sizable margin of victory here, it’s notable that runner-up Andrew Garfield actually took the early lead in the category. That was likely thanks to his emotional appearance in said Spider-Man flick, though he also had a pretty great year outside of that, with terrific lead performances in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s tick,tick… BOOM! and The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Timothée Chalamet, No Way Home co-star Benedict Cumberbatch, and Adam Driver also had banner years in 2021, but they just couldn’t catch Peter Parker. The current one, that is.
The order below reflects the number of total votes cast for each actor by users in a poll that ran on RT from January 10 to January 26.
Tom Holland
Holland reunited with Joe and Anthony Russo for Cherry and led an A-list cast in Doug Liman’s Chaos Walking, but his crowning achievement in 2021 was the monster MCU hit Spider-Man: No Way Home.
