The post was four words and a heart. “Missing my lady.”
Tom Holland put it up on a Sunday in late April 2024, over a photo of Tessa, the blue Staffordshire Bull Terrier his family adopted in 2014. She had died the previous month, weeks short of her tenth birthday. His father, Dominic, had confirmed it first, on Patreon, at the end of March, and had written that Tessa was the only Holland everyone loved all of the time.
There is a version of this story that is just celebrity news. There is a better version, which is about what a specific dog was doing for ten years while the cameras were on her, and why the internet’s reaction to her death was not silly at all.
She was, functionally, a working dog
Not in the service-animal sense. In the sense that she had a job and did it in public.
Tessa went to set. Holland has said she was well-behaved enough that he could bring her along, and she is the reason one of the more enjoyable minor disasters in recent film history happened: on the set of The Current War in 2017, during a substantial Benedict Cumberbatch speech, Tessa, apparently unimpressed and possibly reacting to hay, began sneezing and would not stop.
She went to premieres. She appeared on red carpets, where by Holland’s account she was initially terrified of the cameras and ran, then came back for her share of the attention.
And she went to work in a third sense, the one that mattered most: she was an argument. Holland used her, relentlessly and effectively, as a walking rebuttal to Britain’s fear of “dangerous” breeds. In a 2018 interview he did the air quotes himself, holding a Pit Bull puppy and pointing out how absurd it was to call the animal in his hands dangerous. Talking about Tessa, the pitch never varied: she was, he said, the sweetest, most angelic thing you would ever meet, and Staffies were not aggressive dogs.
She was, in other words, deployed. For a decade, a very famous man put his own dog in front of a camera to change what people assumed when they saw a broad-headed, blocky, muscular dog on a lead.
What Zendaya’s tribute got right
On March 29, Zendaya posted a tribute on the Instagram account belonging to her own dog, Noon, and it is one of the few pieces of celebrity pet grief that does not read as performance. She called Tessa a dear and sweet friend, said it had been a blessing to know her, and wished her an eternity of treats and toys by the ocean.
That is not a publicist’s paragraph. It is what people actually say when a dog they used to play with is gone, and it is roughly what half the internet was already thinking.
Dominic Holland’s version was the one that got me: they planted a tree for her in the front garden, he wrote, rather than the back, so the whole world could see it and share it and enjoy it. That is a very particular kind of grief, the kind where you want the dog to keep being public, because being public is what she did.
Grieving a dog you never met
The reflexive take on all of this is that it is faintly ridiculous. Hundreds of thousands of people, sad about a dog belonging to a man they have never met.
I would put it differently. Tessa was one of the rare celebrity dogs who was legible. You could see her being nervous on a red carpet. You could hear a story about her sneezing through a take. You knew that she was adopted, and how old she was, and that she was the family’s for ten years, which is not an abstraction to anyone who has done ten years with a dog.
Public grief for an animal like that is not parasocial confusion. It is rehearsal. People who lost it over a four-word Instagram caption were not really crying about Tessa. They were crying about the dog asleep behind them, who is eight, and who will also, at some point, be a photograph.
The part that outlives her
Holland’s advocacy did not begin or end with a tribute post. In 2019 he ran a segment with Stephen Colbert called “Rescue Dog Rescue,” pairing shelter dogs from North Shore Animal League America with Marvel-adjacent names, Peter Barker, Spider-Pup, Nicky Furry, Captain Americuddles, for the express purpose of getting them homes. It is very funny and it is also a straightforwardly effective adoption drive, which is the ideal combination.
The dogs he was arguing for are still there. In the UK, Staffies remain one of the country’s most common breeds and one of the most commonly surrendered, filling shelter kennels for months because of exactly the reputation Holland spent a decade poking at with a photo of his own extremely gentle dog.
Tessa is not going to fix that. But she did ten years of the work, mostly by lying down in front of cameras and being nothing like the thing people had been told to expect.
May doggie heaven have red carpets, and photographers with pockets full of treats.
