Emmy Rossum Has No Problem Playing Tom Holland’s Mom Despite Only Being 10 Years Older

Tom Holland is still a young guy, but he’s not that young. He’s 27, three years shy of his 30s. For some context, he’s less than a decade younger than Shameless star Emmy Rossum — who, as it happens, is playing his mom on Apple TV+’s forthcoming psychological thriller series The Crowded Room. But you know who doesn’t mind the short age gap Rossum.

“It makes sense when I read the script,” Rossum recently told Entertainment Tonight. Her character, Candy, she says, is “a super young mom, she’s almost a child in her own right when she becomes pregnant at age 16. You watch as I age from 25 to 35, which is actually younger than I am now.”

Besides, she got over any anxiety she may have had about playing the mother of a 20-something after she “fell in love with the relationship between mother and son and the closeness and everything that they’re grieving in later episodes.”

Holland, mind you, isn’t the only actor playing Danny Sullivan, who as a young man is arrested for a shocking crime in 1979. The younger version of him is played by Zachary Golinger, with whom Rossum, a real-life mother, really bonded.

“I was so taken with the series and really just loved all my scenes, especially with young Danny,” Rossum said. “Our relationship was so beautiful and so I knew everything that we had that I had lost in the scenes with Tom. [It] was really fun.”

Anyway, this is far from the most unrealistic age gap in TV or movies. When The Graduate was released in 1967, 30-year-old Dustin Hoffman was playing an undergrad collegiate having an affair with his parents’ good friend, played by 35-year-old Anne Bancroft. Then there’s Oliver Stone’s Alexander, in which Angelina Jolie plays Colin Farrell’s mom (one year apart, by the way).

The Crowded Room, which also stars Amanda Seyfried, bows on Apple TV+ on June 9.