The only way is Essex with a Gothic twist for Hiddleston!
THE Gothic blockbuster adaptation of The Essex Serpent — starring Tom Hiddleston and Claire Danes — is a suspenseful and, at times, gruesome treat.
Hiddleston brings A-list star power to the six-part adaptation of the book by Sarah Perry, which comes out on Apple TV+ on May 13.
It’s the story of an Essex fishing village engulfed by a superstitious belief that the Devil, in the form of a serpent, has taken and killed a local teenage girl and is stalking the community.
Hiddleston is the married vicar Will Ransome who tries to lead everyone back to reason and to a trust in God.
The production faced numerous problems, not least Covid. The leading lady was to have been Keira Knightley but she dropped out in October 2020 — six weeks before cameras were due to roll — saying that she couldn’t get the right childcare for the four-and-a-half-month shoot because of the pandemic.
Homeland’s Danes stepped in and they filmed from February to June 2021.
Then there was another problem. British director Clio Barnard says: ‘One struggle was balancing the Gothic with the love story, but that was maybe not as big a struggle as trying to find eels,’ which feature heavily in the script.
‘The problem was Brexit halted the import of live eels, so a combination of Brexit and Covid meant it was impossible to actually source any during the production. We finally got hold of some from Holland in November last year. The cast had to come back to do additional shots with them to finish the filming. It was all very stressful.’
The show was launched with a party in London attended by Hiddleston and his fiancée Zawe Ashton, and Danes and her husband Hugh Dancy, who is in the new Downton movie.
Hiddleston told me: ‘The serpent is symbolic of feelings beneath the surface which we don’t understand and there are depths in Will that he hasn’t fathomed yet.’
He is now filming a political thriller for Netflix and will also star as polar explorer Henry Worsley in The White Darkness, again for Apple TV+.