Here’s How to Get Out of a Speeding Ticket, According to Zendaya and Tom Holland

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 19 April 2024

On their way to a spin class, Zendaya and her boyfriend, Tom Holland, were pulled over for speeding—hey, it happens to the best of us. (Apparently, by the way, the spin class was for Holland, not Zendaya—here’s how she put it: “Tom and I were rushing to a spin class—with my mother,” she said on Jimmy Kimmel Live! last night. “I was not going to do the spin class. He was going to do the spin class, ‘cause I don’t do that. But we were going a little fast, ‘cause we were running late.”)

Zendaya herself has never been given a speeding ticket, and while it’s a little unclear who was driving, it appears Holland almost got one in this incident. But then, good ol’ fame swept in. “They recognized that he was Spider-Man, and we were fine,” she explained with a laugh, per The Hollywood Reporter. “We got a warning, and everything was okay.”

Spider-Man not only saved Holland a possible ticket, but also introduced him to his longtime girlfriend—they were co-stars together in 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, 2019’s Spider-Man: Far from Home, and 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home. It was also in 2021 when paparazzi photos outed the two co-stars as a real-life couple, and they’ve kept their relationship fairly private ever since.

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“Our relationship is something that we are incredibly protective of and we want to keep as sacred as possible,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “We don’t think that we owe it to anyone. It’s our thing, and it has nothing to do with our careers.”

Lately, though, as both promote their respective new projects, they’ve been more and more forthcoming about their relationship, like in June, when Holland alluded to how he got the girl by saying “So, long game. Probably making a movie with each other—it definitely helps when the characters are falling in love with one another. You can sort of blur the lines a little bit.”

Not sure the “I play Spider-Man” excuse will work for, well, any of the rest of us mere mortals, but hey—you do what you can with what you have at your disposal, and hopefully Holland made it to his spin class after all.

Rachel Burchfield is a writer, editor, and podcaster whose primary interests are fashion and beauty, society and culture, and, most especially, the British Royal Family and other royal families around the world. She serves as Marie Claire’s Senior Celebrity and Royals Editor and has also contributed to publications like Allure, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle, People, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and W, among others. Before taking on her current role with Marie Claire, Rachel served as its Weekend Editor and later Royals Editor. She is the cohost of Podcast Royal, a show that was named a top five royal podcast by The New York Times. A voracious reader and lover of books, Rachel also hosts I’d Rather Be Reading, which spotlights the best current nonfiction books hitting the market and interviews the authors of them. Rachel frequently appears as a media commentator, and she or her work has appeared on outlets like NBC’s Today Show, ABC’s Good Morning America, CNN, and more.