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Riverdale star K.J. Apa walked out of his audition to play a rebooted Spider-Man knowing he wouldn’t win the role.

“I auditioned for Spider-Man. I didn’t get it,” Apa joked at San Diego Comic-Con when asked by MTV if he’d auditioned for any superhero roles.

“You know, sometimes I walk out of an audition — you know when you walk out and you feel really good about it, feel like they loved it or whatever? I didn’t feel like that.”

The role was eventually filled by Tom Holland, who submitted to Sony and Marvel Studios videos highlighting his gymnastic background.

“For my auditions for Spider-Man, all I did was send them videos of me doing backflips. Like, by the way, I do gymnastics,” Holland told Good Morning America in 2017 when promoting Spider-Man: Homecoming, his first solo outing as the character after debuting in Captain America: Civil War.

“Then I got to my final audition and it was a fight scene with Chris Evans, and it says Spider-Man flips in a frame. So, I said to the producers, ‘Do you want me to do a flip?’ They were like, can you do a flip? Well, yes! I’ve been sending you all these videos for weeks!”

Winning the role, and playing a Spider-Man who for the first time interacts with the Avengers as part of a wider Marvel universe, meant “there was definitely a level of pressure making these movies,” Holland told ComicBook.com in June.

“You know that a lot of people are going to see them, and a lot of people, equally, are going to have an opinion.”

His scene-stealing turn in Civil War, where Holland’s Spidey revealed himself as a recruit under the tutelage of rockstar superhero Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), was Holland’s chance “to audition for the public.”

“I’d got the part and I had auditioned for the producers, and then Civil War was my chance to, kind of, show the world what I was trying to create,” Holland told us.

“And if they didn’t like it, we could change it by the time we got to Homecoming, and if they loved it — which I was very lucky that they did — I just knew that all I gotta do is exactly the same as I did on Civil War, but rather than doing it for 10 days, I need to do it for 100 days in a row.”

Spider-Man: Far From Home, Holland’s followup to Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, is now playing.