Tom hiddleston
Talking Thor! Crimson Peak! And other cool stuff!
With his schooling at Eton, his double-first from Cambridge, his tutelage at RADA, his exceptional courtesy and a CV clogged with period dramas, Tom Hiddleston is often pigeon-holed as the English gentleman of a bygone era. Today, resplendent in a finely tailored grey suit, he’s doing little to prick the perception...
“Actually, the waltz was a huge pleasure,” he says of an early scene in gothic-romance Crimson Peak, where his Sir Thomas Sharpe, an English aristocrat at the dawn of the 20th century, woos Mia Wasikowska’s young American author, Edith Cushing. “It’s a particular pitch of psychological and physical adrenaline. Thomas and Edith are very much falling in love.” His smile widens, his eyes gleam. “Mia’s a trained dancer and I, luckily, did some waltzing at drama school. It’s actually a beautiful thing to do, by the way. I just kind of want to bring back waltzing. You’re very close together and you have to look into each other’s eyes – otherwise you get dizzy – and the actors spinning around in circles makes you feel very happy. We both were like, ‘This is really lovely.’”
But here’s the thing. Hiddleston, grateful as he is for every opportunity that has arrived his way, isn’t content to be “put in a waistcoat and sent out”, as he puts it. Look closer, past his characters’ upright posture, plum-accented articulacy and winning smiles, and there’s more: sadness, darkness. He played an outwardly confident teen whose relationship with his father is fractured in film debut Unrelated for Joanna Hogg; his iconic baddie Loki in Kenneth Branagh’s Thor has “vulnerability” and “ambivalence”, to quote his Crimson Peak director (and comic-book nut) Guillermo del Toro; his F. Scott Fitzgerald, though convivial, is soaked in booze in Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris; noble Captain Nicholls faces the spectre of death in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse; Freddie Page, his charmer in Terence Davies’ post-WW2 drama The Deep Blue Sea, uses vivaciousness to cloak spiritual desolation; and his louche vampire Adam is seriously bummed out in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive.
Well, Crimson Peak, in which Sir Thomas holes his new bride up in a crumbling mansion that manifests the ghosts of his traumatised past, is his most tortured performance yet. Del Toro detected a tragic quality to the actor, and Hiddleston jokes that his director identified the “menace and foreboding” he possesses within.
“It was nice to break new territory, emotionally and psychologically,” he says, leaning his rangy 6’ 2” frame forward in his chair. Sitting in a shadowed trailer on the Universal lot, hiding from the fierce sunshine, it’s hard not to think of the centuries-young Adam when looking at his smooth, pale skin. As if on command, his eyes cloud with introspection. “The work leaves a mark in some way,” he continues. “It leaves a footprint on you in the day. In order to do the job well, you have to respond to imaginary situations with real emotions. So if you have to be upset, or if you have to be scared, or if you have to be caught in some desperate spiritual conflict, then you have to put yourself into that space. The act of crying leaves a mark on you. Usually, if I’m feeling whacked at the end of the day, I think, ‘Well, I’ve probably done my job.’” The grin returns. “But I’m aware it’s a fiction and I can take off the costume and have a shower and go, ‘OK, it’s time to have a hamburger.’”
“i had no choice but to throw my whole soul at playing hank williams”
Born in Westminster on 9 February 1981, Thomas William Hiddleston’s English mother was an arts administer and a former stage manager, his Scottish father a scientist. He attended prep school in Oxford, and then, aged 13, Eton, followed by the University of Cambridge. By the time he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2002, he was already signed by the Hamilton Hodell agency after being spotted in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire, and had made his TV debut in The Lives And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby (2001). Upon graduating in 2005, more TV and stage work followed, including a production of Cymbeline for which he snagged a Best Newcomer Olivier Award in 2008. And then there was the aforementioned big-screen debut Unrelated and a head-turning role as the pensive Edward in Hogg’s sophomore feature, Archipelago.
But everything changed in 2011, when his envious, loquacious baddie Loki Laufeyson, the God of Mischief, stole a good portion of his super-heroic half-brother’s thunder in Thor. Hiddleston had previously worked with director Branagh in TV series Wallander and a production of Chekov’s Ivanov, and actually auditioned for the title role, piling on 20lb of muscle in just six weeks to look the part. He was instead offered Loki, fashioned, thanks to Branagh and Hiddleston’s shared love of Shakespeare, on King Lear’s Edmund, Othello’s Iago and Julius Caesar’s Cassius, albeit with some capoeira moves at his disposal ready for the set-pieces. Loki was a gleefully villainous role that he would return to in Avengers Assemble and Thor 2: The Dark World, leading to the rise of a rabid fanbase: Loki’s Army or, if you prefer, the Hiddlestoners.
In 2017, Hiddleston will feed their insatiable hunger in Thor: Ragnarok. Little has yet been leaked about the third Thor movie, though we do know that all Asgardians are at risk from the titular Norse apocalypse and, according to Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, the events will “impact everything”. By which he presumably means the Avengers: Infinity War movies. In turn, it is also thought that the action of next year’s third Cap movie, Captain America: Civil War, will feed into Thor: Ragnarok. Hiddleston, of course, is staying shtum regarding specifics, but his grin turns radioactive at the mention of Loki.
“I haven’t played Loki for three years,” he starts. “I think this will certainly be really interesting because I feel like I’ve lived a lot of life since. I’m obviously not the same guy that played Loki in 2010 when we made the first one.” Is this a veiled admission that he feels he’s left the role behind, outgrown it in some way? Not at all. “I like the fact that somehow, whenever Chris [ Hemsworth] and I come back and play this relationship out, we try and evolve it. We try and mirror those evolutions. We’ll see. I haven’t read a script. I don’t know what’s going on.”
He has read the script, however, for his other 2017 biggie, Kong: Skull Island, a prequel to Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake, and it made the hairs rise on the nape of his neck. “It’s fantastic, very different, a sort of reimagining of the King Kong mythology,” he says. “It absolutely tips its hat to all King Kong movies that have gone before, with respect and deference, but it’s a new period, a new set of characters. I play a former soldier who is contracted to go to Skull Island for a particular reason, but I am no longer officially a military officer. He’s the protagonist, so I’m not playing the villain, and I’m not playing the antihero. You see the story through his eyes, which is nice. And... erm... I don’t want to tell you much more! Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ [Kings Of Summer] vision was breathtaking. He came in to Legendary and said, ‘What if you did this?’ and we were blown away.”
We’re jumping ahead here, of course. Of more immediate import are a couple of hugely exciting performances that are canned and ready for public consumption: Dr. Robert Laing in Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s savage satire High-Rise, and American singer-songwriter Hank Williams in biopic I Saw The Light.
“There is a lot of darkness in High-Rise, but there’s also a lot of humour – there’s something mischievous about Ben Wheatley’s tone,” he says of the ’70s-set film in which the residents of a luxury tower block engage in all-out class warfare. “There’s something about Laing... he somehow manages, in all of the chaos of the demise of that building, to retain a centre.” So the good doctor won’t be usurping Crimson Peak’s Sir Thomas Sharpe as the most tortured character of his career? “Thomas is definitely more tortured – inwardly, spiritually tortured – than Laing. Laing gets caught up in a vortex of disintegration, but everybody else is spinning around with him. He vaguely remains on the spectrum of sanity. Thomas Sharpe is off the deep end, by himself.”
Still, if you want tortured, look no further than Hank Williams in biopic I Saw The Light. Born in the South in 1923, he grew up dirt poor, with an absent father, suffered from spinal bifida, and – unable to cope with his meteoric rise and punishing touring schedule – became an alcoholic and drug addict.
“It was the biggest challenge of my working life, and the most rewarding – I had no choice but to throw my whole soul at it,” says Hiddleston. “Rodney Crowell, who himself is a gifted and well-respected recording artist, he was my godfather, my coach. I lived at his house for a month in Nashville and we’d get up and have breakfast and we’d play and we’d record something. We listened to blues and we went out on the road. I just became a travelling player in Rodney Crowell’s life for five weeks.”
Hiddleston extracts his iPod and plays ‘Move It On Over’, a song about cheating and being locked out of the house to sleep in the doghouse. “He would write songs that came completely from his heart,” Hiddleston says. “In 1947, in the wake of the Second World War, he released ‘I’m So Lonely I Could Cry’. Men all over the country are going, ‘My god, no one’s ever given me permission to admit that.’”
It sounds like the kind of transformative turn that wins awards. For once, his articulacy fails him… “You know, I can’t... I just can’t think about it,” he stutters. “Because I just think it’s... well... it just seems so unrealistic and unfounded. I faced some fears in the making of the film, and I’m so proud of the result. Anyway, so all that stuff, in answer to your question... it’s so hypothetical.” His squirming, born of modesty, is rather touching to witness. But should nominations come his way to cap a trajectory to rival that of Hank Williams, you can bet on one thing: his feet will remain planted, his head screwed on.
“I just try to remember why I’m doing it,” he shrugs. “I trust my gut about stuff. I hope I don’t take myself too seriously. If you’re comparing me to Hank, I’m lucky I’m not afflicted with the same addictions that he was. That sort of lifestyle has never particularly appealed.” The grin is still there, but now it’s tentative, his brow furrowed in thought. “I try and mind my own business and get on with the work.”
Crimson Peak opens on 16 October. I Saw The Light opens in 2016. Thor: Ragnarok and Kong: Skull Island open in 2017.