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09th Feb 2022

EXCLUSIVE: “I guess it’s kind of illegal” – Tom Holland tells hilarious Uncharted behind-the-scenes story

Rory Cashin

The huge video game blockbuster adaptation finally arrives in Irish cinemas this week!

Over the years, there have been many, MANY famous faces almost cast in the role of Nathan Drake.

The modern-day equivalent of Indiana Jones, he has hundreds of millions of fans around the world following the massively successful Uncharted video games, which is a franchise that Hollywood has been attempting to adapt for around 15 years.

Nathan Fillion, Zachery Levi, Chris Pine and Jensen Ackles were all rumoured to be taking part at one point or another, while Mark Wahlberg had originally signed on to the role over a decade ago, with Robert De Niro in the older mentor role of Sully. Jump forward to 2022, and Wahlberg is now playing Sully, and Tom Holland is playing Nathan.

Holland is hot off the massive success of Spider-Man: No Way Home, and here teams up with Wahlberg and director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland, Venom) for the blockbuster adaptation which taps into story beats and set-pieces from across pretty much all of the games, but specifically taps into the Younger Drake storyline that fans might remember from Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.

Ahead of the release of the movie in Irish cinemas, JOE caught up with Holland to chat about his role, chatting with Wahlberg about swapping characters, pressure and/or support from Uncharted fans and loads more.

Check out the exclusive Irish interview in full right here:

Over the course of the chat, we brought up some of the scenes earlier in the movie, in which Drake plays a barman. During a recent GQ interview, Holland revealed that he studied at a famous bar in order to learn how to properly make those cocktails.

And it turns out, even while making the movie, he was still really making them, as Holland told us the following:

“I probably shouldn’t say this because it’s very… I guess it’s kind of illegal, but when we were shooting in this real bar and we were doing this montage sequence where Nathan is just making cocktails for the patrons of the bar, but all of it was real.

“So I would basically say to crew members ‘What would you like to drink?’, and the grip would be like ‘Make me a whiskey sour’ and the make-up artist would say ‘I would like an espresso martini.’. So in that montage, I was really making drinks and just slyly giving them to the crew.

“By the end of that shoot, it was a Friday night, I said to the producers ‘Can we just keep the bar open? Can we just keep the bar for the night?’ And they were like ‘Well, I’m not sure we can do that…’, And then they spoke to the owner, and the owner said ‘It’s fine, don’t worry about it’.”

“So we ended up having a halfway party and I was the bartender. It was amazing. It was a good time.”

We mentioned that we like the idea of the crew getting progressively more and more drunk, the cameras not being as focussed as they probably should be, and Holland laughed, agreeing: “Yeah, that’s why that scene gets a bit loose!”

We also asked Holland’s co-star Mark Wahlberg if he joined in on the fun. Check out that full exclusive interview right here:

Wahlberg told us:

“I’m one of the responsible people on this film. I was finished shooting that day a little bit early, he had some additional stuff he had to shoot. So I went to my hotel and I made sure that I went to bed so I could get up and train the next day and be able to perform the next day.

“Tom and I did have a couple of dinners and had a few drinks, but for the most part I was kind of on my health kick during the movie. But next time I see him, I’ll drink him under the table.”

JOE also chatted to Holland’s co-stars Sophia Ali and Tati Gabrielle, and you can check out those interviews right here.

Uncharted arrives in Irish cinemas on Friday, 11 February.

Clip via Sony Pictures Releasing UK

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