Tom Holland takes adventuring to the next level in videogame adaptation Uncharted, which has had a long and arduous journey to the screen. Total Film meets the film’s cast and director to find out how a pitch for a young James Bond evolved into an unexpected origin story.

WORDS JACK SHEPHERD

Tom Holland was mid-swing on Spider- Man: Homecoming when a PlayStation was craftily snuck into his trailer. There had been a handful of delays on the superhero set and Holland’s thumbs were being twiddled dry out of boredom, but when the actor retired that day, a surprise new console was waiting to keep those hands busy. A few games were bundled in, but only one stood out: Uncharted: A Thief’s End, the fourth instalment in the swashbuckling, Indiana Jones-esque series.

“I don’t know if that was [Sony Pictures chairman] Tom Rothman planting a seed early on, but I played that game and loved it,” an excited Holland tells Total Film, finally able to discuss the long-gestated film at length. However, despite Holland being initially won over by Uncharted’s cinematic qualities, there was no indication that he would be the right man to bring Nathan Drake –a wisecracking, adventure-seeking hero with an appetite for treasure – to the big screen. “It never occurred to me that I could play him,” he continues, pointing out the character’s age, mid-thirties. That all changed after a pitch meeting – just not one initially linked to Uncharted.

“I had a meeting, after or during Spider-Man 2 [Far From Home], with Sony to pitch this idea of a young Bond film that I’d come up with,” Holland explains. “It was the origin story of James Bond. It didn’t really make sense. It didn’t work. It was the dream of a young kid, and I don’t think the Bond estate were particularly interested.

“But the idea of a young Bond film sparked this idea, in turn, that you could do a Nathan Drake story as an origin story, rather than as an addition to the games. And that opened a conversation, and we started to discuss if I could play this role. After meeting with various directors and scriptwriters and storyboard artists, we made the decision that I was going to be Drake. And here we are now.”

Indeed, here we are now, a few weeks out from Uncharted reaching cinemas. Yet, Holland’s story begins towards the end of this adaptation’s long, winding road to cinemas.

Instead, we have to look back to the late noughties – when David O. Russell was first pinned to direct Uncharted and Mark Wahlberg was set to play the lead role – to truly appreciate how long this journey has been.

Tom Holland plays the iconic Nathan Drake in Uncharted.

SKY, ALAMY

“I’ve been attached for so long, at one point I was playing Nathan Drake, and now I’m playing [older mentor figure] Sully,” Wahlberg says over the phone from Los Angeles. Russell’s initial vision was “drastically different” to the final film, Wahlberg says, not going into specifics. “But I think definitely, by taking the time to figure out the tone, they’ve made the best version of the film,” he adds.

After Russell left the project to direct Silver Linings Playbook, Wahlberg soon followed, and Neil Burger – who, at the time, had just finished Limitless – was put in the directing chair. He then withdrew to helm Divergent, with Horrible Bosses’ Seth Gordon coming on board, only to leave a year later for Baywatch. Shawn Levy eventually entered negotiations to direct in 2016, and a year later Holland was cast as the younger Nathan Drake. Another year passed and Levy departed to take on Free Guy. Dan Trachtenberg and Travis Knight came and went in quick succession, with Venom’s Ruben Fleischer finally taking Uncharted into production in 2020.

“I don’t want to say anybody else didn’t deliver on the material,” Wahlberg – who rejoined the project in late 2019 – says when asked why Fleischer succeeded where so many others had failed. “The other ones didn’t pan out for various reasons.

But ultimately, it’s a big thing for the studio. It’s up to them to get to a place where they’re comfortable with the script, and then Ruben came in, and he really had a great take on the material.”