Tom Holland’s role in Uncharted movie shows video game adaptations are the next big thing for Hollywood and streaming services
- Holland is a fan of the Uncharted game and jumped at the chance to play lead character Nathan Drake in a movie. He talks about his love of the PlayStation
- Sony Pictures’ Uncharted isn’t the only game-inspired production in 2022 – there’s Halo and The Last of Us too. And more screen adaptations of games will come
If Uncharted, mired in development delays for the better part of a decade, becomes a global film franchise for Sony Pictures, the love Tom Holland has for the PlayStation video game console will become the stuff of legend.
Before video game studio Naughty Dog was known for its linear, story-driven narratives Uncharted and The Last of Us – two properties being adapted for film and TV – it was a production house home to more lighthearted fare, particularly the run-and-jump series Jak and Daxter.
Holland cites Jak and Daxter as one of his first video game crushes and talks about meeting Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann the way other actors gush over meeting a legendary director.
“He actually worked on Jak and Daxter, which is one of my favourite games. I loved that game as a kid,” Holland says of Druckmann, who started as an intern at Naughty Dog and worked as a programmer, designer, writer, creative director and vice-president at the Santa Monica, California-based studio before he was promoted to co-president in 2020.
“We were big gamers as kids,” Holland says of himself and his three brothers. “Our parents were always quite strict. We weren’t allowed to play video games on a school night. So I do remember waking up early on a Saturday morning trying to beat my brothers downstairs so I could get to the PlayStation first.”