Jake Gyllenhaal says Tom Holland dissuaded him from panicking on set

• Jake Gyllenhaal, who starred in “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” said being in a Marvel movie was “difficult.”
• Gyllenhaal said he felt compelled to deliver and forgot his line on the first day of filming.
• The actor said he said to Tom Holland, “Dude, help me” and the actor encouraged him to relax.

Jake Gyllenhaal said he panicked on his first day on the set of “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” but co-star Tom Holland helped allay his anxiety.

“It’s tough, man,” Gyllenhaal, 40, said of the pressure of being in a Marvel movie during a virtual interview on SiriusXM’s “The Howard Stern Show” on Monday. “This acting is tough. All of it. This world is huge.”

Gyllenhaal joined the vast Marvel Cinematic Universe as a villain named Mysterio / Quentin Beck in “No Way Home” in 2019.

The film was a sequel to “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and marked Holland’s fifth appearance as the titular New York webslinger.

“It was a train that was already moving,” Gyllenhaal told Stern. “For me, normally, I come very early and I can understand. It was like, ‘You have to deliver in this space.’ And it was a whole different job. “

The Oscar nominated actor said on his first day of filming he couldn’t remember his line.

“I was the plank of wood,” he recalls. “And they were like, ‘Whoa.’ And I went to Tom Holland and I said to him, “Man, help me.” He said to me, ‘It’s all right, man. Relax.’ “

Gyllenhaal added, “It was like he was me in so many situations. And I finally did, but I think I put a lot of pressure on [myself] because I love this world. “

Photos by Jay Maidment / Sony

Holland shared a similar memory of Gyllenhaal’s first day in June 2019 during an appearance on NBC’s “Late Night With Seth Meyers”.

Holland, who is used to getting out of the script and improvising, said Marvel would “sometimes change the lines completely overnight.”

“You’ll be arriving on Monday morning and all of a sudden you’ll have a three-page monologue about interdimensional rifts and all that crazy kind of stuff,” the actor said. “So Jake was like, he was sort of freaked out. So I found myself on the first day working with one of my idols like, ‘It’s okay, man. Its good. This is how it goes here in the Marvel world. So that was really weird. “