From God of Mischief to man of God
TOM HIDDLESTON on his new Victorian-era mystery show The Essex Serpent
TOM HIDDLESTON WAS finishing up the first season of Loki when he got the call: would you like to play a vicar? “They sent me the six episode scripts, and a letter from [director] Clio Barnard,” Hiddleston recalls. “I was just immediately engaged by it.” The scripts he read were an adaptation of The Essex Serpent, a bestselling 2016 gothic mystery novel by Sarah Perry, set largely on the rural coastlines of Essex during the late Victorian era. Hiddleston, at the time, was engaged in a battle for the multiverse with a variant of his character that took the form of an alligator. The future job promised quite a different experience.
“New experiences are always full of curiosity and interest to me,” he says. Part of that difference was the character he was playing. Loki is complex, to put it generously, with occasional genocidal tendencies; his character in The Essex Serpent, Reverend Will Ransome, is fundamentally decent, a family man who cares for his flock, and worries about the effect that rumours of a mythical sea creature are having on his parish. “He has very different foundations in his character,” Hiddleston says. “Will is a much more solid and much more responsible person than Loki. I wouldn’t put Loki in charge of managing the anxiety of his parishioners.”
Hiddleston, who speaks to Empire over Zoom, weeks before Loki Season 2 begins filming (he clarifies that the framed Miss Minutes poster on the wall behind him is because he is in a production office, “in case you thought my general interior-design taste was just, like, memorabilia from Loki”), was excited at the chance to work with Barnard, the British filmmaker whose social-realist background is about as far removed from the MCU as it is possible to get. “She’s got a really singular and original voice as a director,” he says. “There’s a specific curiosity she has towards a certain humanity, I think — characters trying to connect and heal and find the light.”
If The Essex Serpent has anything in common with the dark prince of Asgard, it might be in its fascination with myths: like the MCU, the story borrows and repurposes ancient folk tales.
“It takes place in this God-fearing community,” Hiddleston explains, “where people believe a winged dragon-like beast has come up from the depths to steal children. It’s a belief in the mythic, and how, when we don’t have all the answers, we fill the void with things in our imagination.” He flashes a very familiar grin. “Our imagination is not always accurate.” Perhaps there is still mischief to be found in this man of God, after all.