The young Tom Holland beat out the likes of Charlie Rowe, Matthew Linz, Charlie Plummer, and Judah Lewis for the coveted role of Spider-Man in the new reboot from Marvel and Sony. The press release accompanying his casting announcement referred to the star as “the perfect actor to bring Spider-Man’s story into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.” In a new interview, Holland himself discusses his audition process and reveals why he was so perfect.

Speaking to the Associated Press while making the promotional rounds for In the Heart of the Sea, Holland said that he coincidentally told Empire magazine years back that if he had to play any superhero in a movie it would be Spider-Man in a post-Andrew Garfield reboot.

When I found out that they were recasting the role, I rang up my agent, I said, “Listen, just get me a self-tape. Just please let me send off something so that they can see me — I know it’ll never happen. And he said, “they’ve actually requested to see you,” which was like music to my ears, and it kinda just went from there, really.

Throughout the casting process, he made a show on social media by posting some of his acrobatic skills in various videos — and it turns out that this probably helped sway Marvel and Sony to his side. He said:

Well, I did my first audition tape with Joel Kinnaman — I was shooting a really small indie film with him earlier in the year — and they gave me two scenes and I had to do an ident, which is basically where you say, “Hi, my name is Tom Holland, I’m this, I’m this tall, I’m this old.” And I basically did like a somersault into frame and then a somersault out of frame ‘cause I basically — I was like, they may never see this, but if they do I need them to know that I’ve got some gymnastics abilities and stuff, and every tape I sent in I always did a little acrobatic demo to try and convince them to give me the role.

 Holland will make his first appearance as Peter Parker in Captain America: Civil War, out May 6, 2016, before headlining his own solo Spider-Man movie on July 28, 2017. Watch video snippets from his interview below: