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Favourite Tom Hiddleston images 31/ ∞
By Jada Yuan September 18th, 2015
The screaming fans usually pressed up against barricades along the red carpets of the Toronto Film Festival have had a Benedict Cumberbatch–size hole to fill this year. Lucky for them, another dashing Brit, Tom Hiddleston, who happens to be Cumberbatch’s BFF, had two movies premiering here. (And he was announced as the star of King Kong: Skull Island the day after this interview.)
Up first was the Hank Williams biopic I Saw the Light, in which Hiddleston tries on an Alabama accent and yodels and strums his way through the honky-tonk singer’s greatest hits in such convincing fashion that the audience at my screening would often burst into applause at the end of songs. Then came the premiere of High-Rise, a gonzo adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1975 dystopian sci-fi novel from director Ben Wheatley (Kill List, Sightseers), in which the residents of an ultramodern, luxury high-rise start ignoring societal rules and descend into orgiastic chaos. I am happy to report that both movies involve Hiddleston getting very naked and having very sexy sex (with Elizabeth Olsen in Light and Sienna Miller in High-Rise). We caught up with him amid the festival madness to talk orgies, whether he misses Marvel villainhood, and why it was important to show his butt in Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak.
So, High-Rise: Whoa. Had you seen it before watching at the premiere?
I’d seen it once finished, about three weeks ago. I mean, I knew it was going to deliver that kind of experience. I knew when I read the script, and again when we were shooting it, that it was going to have a playful, provocative element to it. What did you think?
It was batshit. I’m still trying to process. I loved how in the Q&A, director Ben Wheatley said whether you find the movie brilliant or appalling “depends on where you stand on orgies.”
Ha-ha. Exactly.
What’s yours?
What’s my stance on orgies? Listen, if it floats your boat, who am I to stand in judgment? I’ve never been in any real-life context like some of those. I think [author J.G.] Ballard was always, particularly with High-Rise, fascinated by extremity, and what happens to human beings in the most physically and psychologically extreme situations — that actually the mask of civilization is a thin veneer. We’re only one sort of neighborly argument away from all-out chaos and murder, and descent of sort of going back to the jungle. I really think he was just quite rigorous about always taking it to its end point. He never stopped at the boundaries of good taste.
I mean, the opening line of Ballard’s novel is, “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the usual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.” So you’ve got him eating a dog and immediately kind of pushing the sympathies of his readership, saying, “This is what you signed up for.”
What was that shoot like? Did it devolve into chaos, too?
Weirdly, it felt quite contained, but in the best way. It had to be. The way the film was structured, we all shot from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day, and it was quite rigorously controlled. We never went over because Ben needed to save the money for the visual-effects shots of the exterior of the building. So it was, for an actor, a strangely regular day job. We would turn up and go mad, and then pack up and go home.
And be covered and dirt and blood.
Yeah, to shoot it was enormous fun because there were so many parties where it was about lack of inhibition and dancing and being mischievous. It felt like a very mischievous set. And so any things we came up with on the hoof, you know? We knew Laing and Royal had to play squash. We didn’t quite know how we were going to shoot it until we spent a day in a squash court, and I love that scene. You never see that. You sort of never see that stage.
Did you party after the 6 p.m. end of day?
No. [Laughs.] We had very sedate dinners. We shot it in a town called Bangor in northern Ireland, which is by the sea, this very beautiful northern Irish seaside town where they do fish and chips and Scotch eggs, so we would wash off the blood and the paint and the soot and the dust, and go and have a quiet piece of fish and a glass of wine, and get to bed and get ready for the next round the next day.
Between High-Rise, I Saw the Light, and the Crimson Peak trailer, I’ve seen your butt three times in the last couple of days.
Wow. I apologize unreservedly.
Do you have any qualms about doing nudity?
I don’t, particularly. If it’s justified in the storytelling, I absolutely have no problem with it. That’s sort of my condition, if I can see where it fits into the story. In fact, in Crimson Peak, I really pitched for that scene because it’s about the twin energies of sexuality and violence, these polar opposites. Gothic romance is actually all about sex and death, and there’s always an undertone, whether it’s Northanger Abbey or Jane Eyre or The Castle of Otranto. The proximity of death and our fear of it, but also the fact that we’re impelled by our sexuality towards things and towards choices and people is actually what gothic romance is about. Guillermo and Mia and myself all agreed that that sex scene had to be quite powerfully realized.
The trailer is very steamy.
The movie is absolutely beautiful. It’s certainly the most beautiful film I’ve ever been in. It’s a gothic fairy-tale, so it has an extraordinary integrity in its design. It looks like a painting, and every single frame you disappear into in a way that perhaps only Guillermo del Toro can imagine. And it has an extraordinary sincerity, which is unique for our time, because there’s a lot of quite glib storytelling, and some of it’s very assured and successful, and some of it, you wish as though there was a little bit more heart and soul. I love that Guillermo has told this story very sincerely about a young woman who falls in love with somebody, a man, who has a mystery, and behind the veil of that mystery, actually a whole load of dark secrets, and she ends up having to save herself, and it’s kind of a fable, really, about survival and independence, and finding out who you really are.
You’re going to be back in the Marvel world as Loki with Thor 3, yes?
I don’t know that I am. I haven’t spoken to anybody at Marvel for two years. So I literally — there’s no side to it. I just don’t know.
Did you have villain envy watching Avengers: Age of Ultron?
Ha-ha. No. No. I was good.
You don’t miss it?
I enjoyed the film enormously. Of course I did, and it made me feel proud of all those guys. They’re all old friends now. But, no, I had really fulfilling, interesting year last year. I did Crimson Peak, High-Rise, and I Saw the Light in one straight year while they were shooting Age of Ultron, so I was happy. I was busy.
You sang beautifully in I Saw the Light. There were some moments when you were doing Hank Williams’s songs that, afterwards, the audience burst into applause.
I’m so glad to hear you say that. That was the most challenging, the most difficult, and the most joyful aspect of the film for me.
There’s been some blowback about you not being southern, or even American. How do you reconcile that?
Well, it’s in my makeup somehow that when people tell me I can’t do something, I want to prove them wrong. It always has been. But of course I kind of expected that before I signed on. The only way I can explain it is from my own perspective, which is, as an actor, I’ve always been most compelled by unknown territory. I like to think of myself as a correspondent sort of going off into foreign territory and scratching around and bringing back my findings. I hoped that the fact that I was not American and not from the South and there were so many things that I wasn’t born with actually made me more committed to honor Hank Williams, his family, his legacy, even more. It gave me kind of a deeper, more profound desire to get it right.
Have you met the family?
I’ve met Jett, Bobbie Jett’s daughter, and I’ve been in touch with Holly, his granddaughter, who’s a musician in her own right. She saw the film, and she wrote me one of those letters that you keep forever, which is really actually all I need. I mean, people know Hank Williams, but they only know some of his songs; they don’t know the circumstances of his life. But I can tell you — and I mean this really sincerely — it was such a pleasure to make that music. The thing that caught fire about Hank was his honesty and his authenticity, and the reason he became a star is because he wrote from his heart, and he sang from his heart, and he was singing about being in the doghouse or being so lonesome he could cry. Men and women in the wake of the Second World War, across the South, across America, were like, “That guy is the real deal. He has this brazen full voice, and he’s singing about me. That’s what my life is like.” That was just a really powerful inspiration as an artist. For someone to be so truthful and say, “This is who I am. I’m going to put this out there, and I hope you can relate to it.”
Are you still singing?
Yeah! I still have my Gibson J-45. Sometimes I even travel with it. I mean, it’s addictive.
*
For the record I hate the sensationalism of this headline. But there are some really great soundbites from Tom and he does a magnificent job of ignoring the reporters thirst, so it’s still worth a read.
High-Rise Director, Ben Wheatley, on the appeal of Tom Hiddleston, 9th October 2015
Ben Wheatley on Instagram, 10th June 2020: Photo credit to @maxcav1 this is a drawing i did for T-shirt’s for high rise q and a tour.. a rare New York one featuring a tribute to action comics Kids Rule OK cover. Featuring a highly unflattering drawing of @thereallukeevans haha :)
Gary M. Kramermay, 14th May 2016
“High-Rise” is director Ben Wheatley’s dizzying, savage adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s dazzling, savage novel. Amy Jump, who is Wheatley’s wife, penned the screenplay. The story concerns a physiologist, Dr. Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), who moves into a modern apartment complex—complete with swimming pools, supermarkets and other amenities—and watches society break down completely. The high-rise is, of course, a metaphor for class inequality, with Richard Wilder (Luke Evans), a documentary filmmaker and shit-stirrer living on one of the low floors, challenging the status quo of Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons), the building’s designer, who lives in the penthouse. Laing, who lives on a middle floor, watches the devolution and subsequent revolution with a cool detachment--that is, until his hand is forced and he must act to survive. (Read Andrew O'Hehir's Salon review.)
Wheatley delivers the goods in “High-Rise” with real panache, vividly depicting the violence, orgies and other bad behavior. Hiddleston, currently starring in the impressive TV miniseries “The Night Manager,” and Wheatley had tea with Salon in a New York hotel room to discuss their film, shooting orgies, and how they would fare with the end of the world.
Tom, on screen, you’ve lived in a converted barn in Tuscany in “Unrelated,” a stately mansion in “Crimson Peak,” and now in a modern apartment complex in “High-Rise.” If a man’s home is his castle, where are you most comfortable?
Hiddleston: I like my house in London, to be honest. I don’t want to reveal too much, but it’s an old artist’s studio from the mid-19th century. There have been extensions, but it is, essentially, a bungalow. My feet are on the ground. I’ve got a little outside space, and it suits me just fine.
What about you, Ben?
Wheatley: I live in a house.
Hiddleston: A lovely house.
Wheatley: We had a little house, and now we have a bigger house. If I swing a cat around, it doesn’t hit the walls or the floor or the windows.
Tom, you’ve appeared in several class-based stories, from Joanna Hogg’s films “Unrelated” and “Archipelago” to “High-Rise.” What appeals to you about these kinds of characters?
Hiddleston: I hope I haven’t been typecast. The Hogg films are depictions of human life that she recognizes…
Wheatley: The Joanna Hogg roles are very different from each other and the Laing role.
Hiddleston: The one thing that I think unites these three characters is…
Wheatley [interrupting]: Height! [Hiddleston and Wheatley burst out laughing].
Hiddleston: They all look like me…
Wheatley: It’s uncanny! [Laughter continues]
Hiddleston [getting serious again]: They seem like one thing on the surface, and there is something else going on beneath it.
Wheatley: That’s definitely what attracted Amy and me to work with Tom. He has a sense of control and then he has a sense of something else bubbling below the surface, trying to capture those emotions. He’s like that as Loki.
Hiddleston: That’s probably who I am. I don’t know anyone who isn’t like that. That’s my, perhaps—and it’s not a clean reading—my experience. We are all so complex and contradictory. We try to put our best foot forward and, quite often, behind closed doors is something much more chaotic and turbulent and vulnerable. There’s that phrase that everyone you meet is fighting a battle you don’t know about.
Wheatley: That’s a good one. Where’s that from?
Hiddleston: I can’t remember. I don’t know. From somewhere. But it’s true! I’m not sure whether it’s about the size of our society now. My sister [studied] social anthropology at college and she did a paper about this. We still haven’t evolved beyond really being able to associate with more than about 100 people. As evolutionary beings, we’re still made to know about 100 people. As the numbers get bigger, the more dissociated and detached we become from everybody else. In order to make sense of the world, psychologically, it’s easier to objectify people and say, “You are that.” People are defined by their job, or their physical appearance, or their zip code. And it is easier on the brain—and I suppose what I’m saying is that if you acknowledge each of those individual faces in a crowd is unique, then each character is going to have its unique complexity and turbulence, and that’s what I find interesting about being an actor. [Hiddleston flips his hand in the air in a triumphant gesture. Wheatley appreciates it with a raucous cheer.]
Ben, how do you approach a tricky text like the Ballard novel and capture the spirit of it on screen?
Wheatley: Well, I’ll tell you how it’s done. You get a really, really brilliant person to write the script. Amy Jump did it. To be clear, I had no hand in the writing of the script. The cliché of how a director interacts with a screenwriter, stalking around the room in a smoking jacket, ripping pages from the novel, and indicating “Put this in!”–it’s not like that. Our relationship is completely separate. She took the book away and came back with a fully formed script. That was it. That was the script that we made.
What can you say about your vision for the film? How did you imagine it from the book?
Wheatley: My job was adapting the screenplay. The script is a very clever adaptation of the book, but there are other things going on in it. It’s talking about Amy’s and my 1970s childhood, and our relationship with that generation. It comes [together] in baby steps. There are elements that are practical, like the whole idea that the characters are talking from balcony to balcony. That dictates the shape of the building. It took me a while to work it out. I stayed in an apartment with balconies. When there was a description in the book that the tower is like a hand and the palm is the lake, I thought: that’s what it is. When you see the bend on the fingers, that’s where we are going to put these tiered balconies. I had a lot of conversations with Mark Tildesley, the production designer, who came up with a way to unify the whole space. We were worried that the swimming pool and the supermarket and other disparate places would feel like they were in different locations from the tower, and that would throw the audience. Mark came up with the idea of this motif to bring everything together with a triangular pillar, and built that into every set. I liked that it impinged on the humans. It’s not a nice shape. You get the feeling of weight—the whole building is weighed down on everybody. That helps.
Let’s talk about the end of the world…
Hiddleston: A great subject!
Laing is organized, proficient, disciplined. Yet at the start of “High-Rise” he is seen being barbaric. He adapts, as necessary, to the bizarre. What are your survival skills, and how would you fare with the breakdown of society? Are you more likely to be assertive (as Wilder is) or be invisible (as Laing tries to be)?
Wheatley: It’s happening, isn’t it? We’re already in it. I always love that in my relationship with Amy, she’s the one who’s ready to be called straight to arms. Whereas I get stunned easily in stressful situations, so I would be quite useless.
Yes, my spouse says if a dirty bomb were to go off, he’d go outside and inhale deeply. I, however, would try to stay alive, even if it kills me!
Wheatley: I’ve had a similar thing. I always think in the moment, I’d become the man. And come the moment, the man doesn’t turn up. My inner coward would manifest itself.
Tom, how do you think you would you react?
Hiddleston: I think I’ve spent my whole acting career answering that question. The truth is, I don’t know. How could I know?
Wheatley: You’re very good at running, though… you could probably remove yourself from any situation and be five miles away before it kicked off.
Hiddleston: Thanks, I’ll take that.
Suddenly, Ben notices something unusual going on outside. The interview stops for a moment. We all look out the window where jet planes are skywriting. [“FACT CHECK ARMENIA,” the text reads when completed]
Hiddleston [astonished]: I’ve never seen anything like that in my life! Does that routinely happen in New York?
Wheatley: My brain’s on fire…What is that?!… It’s like a bubble jet printer for the sky!
Hiddleston [incredulous]: Gary, Is this the end of the world? [Laughter, and then the interview resumes again in earnest]
Hiddleston: Drama is what happens to human beings in extreme situations. That is why we’re fascinated by it. That’s why everybody flocks to films about the apocalypse, that’s why people love zombie movies. That’s why people are moved by superhero movies. That’s why everyone sees “The Revenant.” They are asking: What would I do in that situation? And the truth is that none of us know. We would like to believe that we would make noble, courageous decisions, but you don’t know until it happens, I suppose, the choices you would make. Would I be someone who is crippled by fear? Would I be too brave, too soon, and therefore disadvantage myself? I remember watching “Alive” and being so interested by this true story where certain people emerged from the group and were tougher than others.
Wheatley: I think the story of being brave is a fabrication. On a moment-by-moment basis, you get tested again and again. When you read about the Second World War, these guys are confronting stuff again and again and again, it’s not just surviving one thing. But within that behavior, you can have days where you’re terribly afraid, and days when you’re not. I think that is probably closer to it. You don’t always behave extremely well, but sometimes you do.
Hiddleston: One of the first parts I ever played was in a play called “Journey’s End,” about a company of officers in a trench in 1918, and they all deal with the horror of the First World War in a completely different way. A schoolmaster retells the story of “Alice in Wonderland,” because it makes him feel comfortable. Somebody else complains about the food; the next tries to skive off sick with neuralgia; and the soldier I play, who is intensely brave in battle but is deeply, deeply damaged, and gets himself to sleep with a bottle of whisky every night. And I remember I was 18 years old when I played this part, and I had no frame of reference to draw on. I was the right age, and had I been there 100 years ago, I wonder which guy I would be?
Laing seems somewhat afraid of having an emotional connection. Can you discuss that aspect of his character?
Hiddleston: That’s the interesting challenge to me, presented by the book. Ballard deliberately chose Laing’s profession as a physiologist. He’s someone who is obliged to be detached to deconstruct the biomechanics of human engineering, which keeps him at arm’s length from behavior dysfunction. He’s able to diagnose human behavior according to chemicals and hormones, and organ dysfunction, but the fact is, he’s a man faced with a crisis, and at what point does he commit one way or another? How does he feel about it? I think that detachment is what makes it interesting. I think he comes face to face with some truth about himself that he never acknowledged, and had never been aware of, in the devolution of the high-rise. Laing has moved into the high-rise to get away from the entanglements of real life. He wants the anonymity of a clean, grey, clinical space.
Laing attends various parties in the high-rise: costume parties, children’s parties, social get-togethers and even orgies. How did you film the orgies, Ben?
Wheatley: It’s really tough filming orgies, I’ve found. Amy was laughing, because in the script, that party wasn’t going to be as raucous as it was. I brought that upon myself. I sent the production team out to go get me a load of naked people, and it’s very hard to get them in Northern Ireland because “Game of Thrones” has pumped the per-person cost of nudity through the roof. So now, no one will be naked in Northern Ireland for under £1,000. It’s very expensive. So we had to figure out how to do it. When I did “Kill List” in England, it’s only £30 more to be naked for an extra. But in Ireland, it was £1,000 straight up. So I had this clever idea to contact local swingers groups, because I knew they would be just the kind of people…
Hiddleston: I wasn’t present that day.
Wheatley: So these guys and gals turned up and they loved it. They loved being naked. And you’d see them out of the corner of your eye, and the trickiest one was this guy who had the most enormous penis I’ve ever seen. It was down to his knee. I think, as a man, it’s a fight-or-flight thing from the Serengeti when you see a penis that big. You can always see it. Even when you have to think about something and are focusing on some middle distance, you realize, “I’m staring right at this guy’s cock!” [Tom starts clapping in hilarity] It was just huge. And he was so proud of it. It’s the best thing that happened to him. I met him earlier in the day, and he was a very confident man, but little did I know why. But I did find out.
So that’s how you film orgies.
Tom Hiddleston has had a busy few years, jumping from blockbuster-sized movies like Thor, in which he tackles the character of Loki, to quietly slipping into the shoes of country legend Hank Williams in I Saw the Light. And now he stars in Ben Wheatley’s grotesque adaption of J.G. Ballard’s 1970s sci-fi novel, High-Rise, opening in the U.S. on May 13.
Hiddleston portrays Dr. Robert Laing, the newest resident in a luxurious high-rise tower block that provides all the conveniences of modern life. Things, however, quickly turn to madness and debauchery as power failures spread through the building and tensions amongst neighbors escalate. The opening scene, in which Dr. Laing calmly sits, spit-roasting a dog is a good indication of what one might expect.
Hiddleston spoke with Esquire about the challenges of taking on such drastically different characters, the ways in which he prepared for such a disturbing film, and how J. G. Ballard’s visions for the future eerily came true.
ESQ: I have to confess. As I was watching High-Rise, it struck me just how much this condo I’ve been renting reminds me of the building in the movie. But nobody has killed anybody yet. To my knowledge.
Tom Hiddleston: [Laughs] Hey, those elevator shafts. You want to make sure the lifts keep working!
OK. I’m starting to feel exceedingly paranoid! Speaking of the movie and not at all of a plausible real-life scenario: You’ve played so many different characters. How do you find yourself within all of them?
That’s a really great question, and it’s one that nobody has ever asked. I truly feel like the duty of an actor is to expand into unknown territory. I had an acting teacher once who told me that you have to have an elastic band around your waist and it has to stretch—to encircle other people. In the end, it’s an amazing way to live, because by playing different people, or at least defending the view points of different people (which acting has to be), you find yourself in contexts which are always alien and unfamiliar. You come away from those experiences feeling a bit more full and feeling like you know the world a little bit better.
As an actor, when you’re working on these bigger projects as opposed to more “independently budgeted” films…does it make a difference to you?
High-Rise was a tiny film by the way. It was made for 6 million pounds, which is about $8.5 million.
Right. Or like $12 million Canadian. See, the numbers keep going up.
All right. [Laughs] $12 million Canadian. It [still] felt like a small film, and we shot it very quickly. The process is just to do the best you can. Work, work as hard as you can and be diligent and respectful…
Do you love them equally, or do you have a preference?
I do. I find different things to love about them. They express different parts of my own fascination, my own interests. Everything I do is always about the human condition, what it means to be alive in some form or other—even if it’s a big blockbuster. That’s what cinema is about.
With High-Rise, which is a bit more abstract and experimental, how do you make sense of it? How do you approach your character in the midst of all this chaos?
I wanted to sync up with Ben. I always do that when I sign on to a film: I try to sync up with the tone of what a director is trying to do. I ask them to give me some movies to watch, give me some books to read, give me some music to listen to—to try and find a framework they are working in so I can place myself within it. So I think I knew what I was in for. And I love Ben’s work. He’s rebellious and he’s mischievous and has his own singular sense of humor and taste. The most fascinating thing for me was that Laing is reactive, whereas other people are proactive. He’s quiet and watchful, while the other inhabitants are sliding into a kind of chaos.
Chaos would be an understatement. But Laing is rather detached, isn’t he?
Because of his profession as a physiologist I think he has a kind of an intellectual detachment about disease and human impulses, so he’s able to withdraw emotionally from the psychological impact of this feral chaos.
What were the challenges in portraying him?
I found that he’s a character who has a lot of private guilt and shame. He’s moved into this building to get away from the complexities of life. He’s trying to stay detached, and he actually can’t. It’s all about his unprocessed guilt. There’s a lot of guilt going around, he’s trying to get away from real life. He wants to live in a grey flat and wear a grey suit and not be affected.
I took my cue from the book, and I found it fascinating that J.G. Ballard choses his leading character to be a physiologist, someone who understands the mechanical engineering of the human brain and body. And so I took that on and did some research. I went to talk to a forensic pathologist in a hospital in England, and I watched him perform some real life autopsies, which were actually very hard to stomach. I almost fainted.
That’s probably a good sign.
I wanted to understand the perspective of the people who do that every day, who have a sensitivity to that kind of work but also have the scientific rigor. They can actually deconstruct a body and [determine] the cause of death. These are the people we depend on in our society, and if someone falls dead in the middle of the street, the forensic pathologist will cut them open and tell us why.
I’d just assume it’s the work of a serial killer and call it a day. Why do you think we have this fascination with dystopian movies and books?
I don’t know, I think we’re always fascinated by our nightmares. We have hopes and dreams. As human beings, we’d like to believe that our society is getting better, more equal, more fair, more healthy, more balanced—and we fear that it’s getting worse. More toxic, more unequal, more sick. And dystopian nightmares are always manifestations of our fears: that the world is going to hell in a handcart and that we can’t stop it.
But I think that they can also be very playful. Think of all the disaster movies. That’s another version of that nightmare, the fear of the apocalypse. Whether that’s Terminator 2, or Robinson Crusoe being stranded on a deserted island, or Cast Away. I think there’s something very child-like about imagining who you might be on a deserted island.
It’s interesting that you use the word “nightmare"—as you watch the movie, it feels like you’re trapped in one…wait, now I get it!
[Laughs] Yeah! I think Ben would be thrilled with that.
The book is set in the ‘70s, so what’s the relevance of some of the issues that the movie is tackling?
I think Ballard saw things coming. He used to say it’s as if he was standing roadside with a warning [sign] saying "dangerous bend ahead,” because the human race is progressing at such a velocity. We are hurtling towards progress and the future. He predicted our attachment to technology. He saw it coming.
There’s an interview of him in 1978 saying that we’re going to take a lot more pictures, we’ll all have access to video footage, we’re going to become the stars of our own films, photographs will become much easier to reproduce, we’ll take pictures of our food, we’ll take pictures of each other, and we’ll take pictures of ourselves in our bedroom. He’s basically predicting Instagram, social media, and YouTube 30 years before they were conceived. So I think he understood that there was a marriage between psychology and technology, which was coming around.
Right now, there’s a lot of talk about the classes, the 1%, and all that. We definitely see plenty of that class struggle reflected in the film, don’t we?
It’s a very obvious metaphor. There’s unequal access to the resources in the building, depending on where you live. The people on the lower floors are furious that in the penthouse they still have electricity [while] the lights go out in the basement, or that the swimming pool is closed to children from the lower floors. There’s a righteous moral anger about inequality that’s being told there. And perhaps Ballard is saying that it’s inevitable. He’s saying that it’s part of the human condition, some sort of striving for status.
It’s interesting that as soon as people go for their inner wishes, their animal desires, if you will, once all structure is taken away, their inclination is to do all these horrible things…
Perhaps Ballard is saying: Who are we really? Who are we in extremity? If no one is watching and no one is there to stop us, what will we do?
Well, he seems to think that we would do very bad things…do you agree?
[Laughs] We would do different things. And what your definition of “bad” is where you stand.
True. But I’m not sure if everything is quite so morally ambivalent.
I don’t think so either, but our moral compass is conditioned by society. For example, I’m sort of playing devil’s advocate. We think it’s OK to eat beef and lamb and chicken, but we think it’s wrong to eat dog. It’s societally not problematic to eat steak, but it is problematic to eat a piece of dog. And it’s only because someone decided that hundreds of years ago. If that was the only access to food you had, you might have to do it? And that’s what Ballard is interested in: When you’re really pushed, when it comes down to a matter of life or death, what are you prepared to do?
When you’re doing a role like this—or any role really, you’re sort of putting yourself on the line, while at the same time saying, “I can do this.” So where do you find that confidence as an actor?
I honestly don’t know. I think it’s a desire to challenge myself. It comes back to that thing I was saying about expansion and wanting to stretch and grow. It’s the same reason people travel, you know? When you’re born, you get used to your cot and your crib. And then you get used to your bedroom. Then you get used to your family home, and your school and your town. And then eventually you want to get out of that—you want to broaden your horizons, and the process of being an actor is that. I feel like I want to travel far and wide, and that’s why I choose to do different projects. I don’t know where the confidence comes from. I think it comes more from curiosity than confidence.
I guess that’s the great thing about an actor. You’re not limited to having just one life, or one occupation. You get to experience so many.
You do. You experience a lot of different things. You see a lot of different sides to the world.
By Mekado Murphy, April 21, 2016
If you’re looking for a project with Tom Hiddleston in it at the moment, you don’t have to look far. Currently on the big screen, he’s playing Hank Williams in the biopic “I Saw the Light.” Currently on the small screen, he plays the hotel manager Jonathan Pine in the mini-series adaptation of John le Carré’s “The Night Manager.” And coming to screens both big and small, he’s playing Dr. Robert Laing in the film adaptation of the satirical J. G. Ballard Novel “High-Rise.” That film, which imagines an apartment building where the wealthy get the best views and services and the poor are relegated to lower floors, is at the Tribeca Film Festival now, and will be on demand April 28 and in theaters May 13.
In an interview this week in New York during the festival, Mr. Hiddleston discussed his work on “High-Rise,” the critical response to “I Saw the Light” and the social media response to a particularly steamy scene in “The Night Manager.” Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.
Q. How did you end up everywhere all of a sudden?
I apologize, unreservedly, first of all, for being everywhere. I’m sure it’s deeply tiresome and nobody wants to ever see my face again. There’s a strange coincidence in that the work of the last 18 months of my life has all been released at the same time. And for me, each piece of work has such integrity and focus. But it must seem different to be in the audience. I do feel very lucky that I’m allowed to do so many different things.
How did you get cast in “High-Rise?”
I knew Jeremy Thomas, the producer, who is a legend in independent filmmaking. He and I made the Jim Jarmusch picture “Only Lovers Left Alive” together. Oddly enough, the director Ben Wheatley and his screenwriter Amy Jump, who happen to be married, told me that when they were conceiving of the cast for “High-Rise,” they had a picture of me on their fridge, which I found initially disconcerting, but actually is a huge compliment. I think Ben and Amy had always imagined me in the role of Laing.
What made you want to do it?
I’m a huge fan of Ben Wheatley’s work. As a British filmmaker, he has a singular vision and voice. The combination of Ben’s taste with Ballard’s sensibility was a thrilling prospect. They share a very sophisticated kind of rebelliousness. They’re not afraid of being provocative or asking quite challenging questions in their work. And “High-Rise” seemed to present that. It is an exploration of human nature in extremis. I think the best drama puts human beings in extreme situations and challenges them.
When did you become familiar with Ballard’s work?
My first introduction came when I was at college and my best friend at the time was a huge fan. He was reading “Concrete Island” and “Cocaine Nights.” He was always very vocal about Ballard’s prescience. As a science-fiction writer, Ballard saw where the world was going. He was fascinated by technology and our obsession with it. “High-Rise” was written in 1975, but if you read it, it feels like today.
How much time was there between shooting “High-Rise” and shooting “I Saw the Light”?
I shot them back to back, so I had a week off in between.
What was it like to go so quickly from this stylized 1970s high-rise building world of the movie to the Southern environs of country music?
It was very strange. I’m happy I had the week off. I finished “High-Rise” on the 25th of August, 2014, and I landed in Nashville on the 2nd of September. And I think it took me a while to shake “High-Rise,” in a way. When you’ve been immersed in one particular environment, it casts a shadow for a time. It was mad, thinking about it. Thank God I went straight to Tennessee, because otherwise I would never have been able to get my head in the game.
With “I Saw the Light,” the critical response to the film was relatively poor. I’m curious what you thought about that?
Well I’d be a fool if I didn’t admit it’s not the best news in the world. But the experience of making that film was so pleasurable that I’ll always have it. The people I’ve met who’ve seen the film have been very generous and have somehow caught a sense of the passion with which it was made. It was a huge labor of love. I spent over five months of my life making it, thinking about it every minute of every day. That’s what it’s like making films. You commit a huge amount of time and energy to make things and it only takes two hours for anyone in the audience, whether they like it or not. But everyone is entitled to their opinion, and the only thing I can control is my commitment to the work.
When “The Night Manager” played in Britain, one of your sex scenes caused a sensation on social media. How did you feel about that?
It was probably very good that I was away in Vietnam making “Kong: Skull Island” when that happened. When we shot the scene, I didn’t see it as being any more or less significant than any other scene in “The Night Manager.” The response is surprising, but it is what it is, I guess. The thing about any love scene, I think the representation is always quite different from the actual experience of making it.
The Sunday Times Culture Magazine, 6th March 2016
By David Gritten, 22nd March 2016
An ambitious new film adaptation starring Tom Hiddleston brings JG Ballard’s dystopian novel High-Rise to unsettling, darkly humorous life. David Gritten goes behind the scenes
Suave and pencil-slim in a silvery-grey suit, Tom Hiddleston strolls languidly across the lawn of a picturesque garden, navigating between flower beds until he reaches a thatched barn at its very edge and pushes open the door. On this sunny August day, it is a glorious setting.
For the cameras tracking his progress, Hiddleston walks the walk four more times. It feels like a lovely, low-key, rather traditional scene – but in the completed High-Rise, a big-screen adaptation of JG Ballard’s 1975 novel, this location will be seen in an utterly different context.
Bangor Castle Walled Garden, 12 miles from Belfast and dating from the 1840s, is at ground level. But in High-Rise, thanks to digital effects, it appears 40 storeys up: an amazing rooftop garden crowning the cool, stylish London apartment block of the film’s title. In Ballard’s novel, set ‘five minutes in the future’, the high-rise is more than just a block of flats. Ben Wheatley, the film’s British director, notes, ‘It’s a metaphor. It’s a building; it’s also a man or a woman. It’s a country; it’s the world. It works on all those different levels.’
On the uppermost floor lives Royal (played by Jeremy Irons), the architect of the high-rise. He owns the rooftop garden, a grand folly populated by a sheep and a horse, and occasionally by his bored wife (Keeley Hawes), usually dressed in a Bo Peep costume.
Together they live in the sumptuous penthouse. ‘I think it’s no coincidence that he’s called Royal,’ Irons says. ‘He’s interested in how best we can organise society. He hoped the building would be “a crucible for change” in people’s lives – and it certainly is that, but not as he expected.’
The story tracks the building’s rapid decline as its technology and services falter – lifts cease to work, fires break out, the in-house supermarket runs out of produce. The residents (played by the likes of Sienna Miller, Luke Evans and James Purefoy), defined by the level they occupy, turn feral, indulging in wild parties and rampant sex (not all of it consensual) while rioting to force their way up from lower floors and overthrow the established order. The high-rise, it appears, has that effect on people.
Into this cauldron steps Hiddleston’s sleek bachelor hero, Robert Laing, a successful physiologist. Hiddleston’s Laing, who takes an apartment on the 25th floor, is elegant, sophisticated and self-contained, a neutral observer. But as he comes to accept the startling shift in the residents’ behaviour, his own begins to change. ‘The impact of the building on his mind creates a volatility in him that’s very visible and dark,’ Hiddleston says.
The producer Jeremy Thomas, a veteran of some 70 films (including the Oscar-winning The Last Emperor), knew Ballard well and owned the film rights to High-Rise. He had wanted to adapt it for two decades, but ‘never managed to find a satisfactory combination of material and realistic budget size’.
Thomas had also produced the film adaptation of Ballard’s controversial novel Crash, about a group of people sexually aroused by car crashes, which, on its UK release in 1997, was banned by Westminster Council after a media outcry against it.
‘It’s been a long time coming,’ Thomas says. ‘I thought [High-Rise] was an amazing book when it was published – and it’s an amazing book today. Ballard was really prescient in his futurology.’
Wheatley approached Thomas and suggested it as a period piece – kept in the 1970s rather than treated as science fiction. It helped that in the past few years Wheatley’s reputation as a director has soared, thanks to low-budget films such as Down Terrace (2009), Kill List (2011) and Sightseers (2012) – all peppered with grisly murders and very dark humour.
A five-minute stroll from the walled garden is the old Bangor Castle Leisure Centre, built in 1973, a forbidding brutalist slab closed down a year before filming began. ‘We walked in here and found most of the film inside,’ Thomas says. ‘It has a swimming pool, a squash court and lots of corridors, all of which featured in scenes that had been written. So suddenly, we’re making the film in Northern Ireland.’
That meant a tax break for the £6.5 million production, with its 60-strong crew. It sounds a modest budget, but this is by far the biggest film Wheatley, 44, has directed; he completed Down Terrace, his debut, for just £6,000 in eight days.
Inside the leisure centre, the production team has gone to town: the swimming pool alone evokes the degradation and breakdown of order that occurs as the story progresses. Its water is a noxious yellow-tinged shade, and piles of debris – a lilo, a book, underwear, a discarded swimming costume, tissues – are floating. Bricks and boards are missing from its surrounds. It looks a complete dump.
A feeling of claustrophobia affects all the characters, whichever level of the high-rise they live on. There is the self-regarding Royal, who distances himself from the increasing chaos. Luke Evans plays Wilder, a documentary filmmaker and sexual predator; his career is on the skids, and he is determined to overturn the building’s existing order. James Purefoy is Pangbourne, a malevolent gynaecologist. Brutish staffers in tuxedos patrol Royal’s upper floors.
Sienna Miller plays Charlotte, a single mother who lives directly above Laing’s flat; she is vaguely amoral, but at least agreeable. Ann, Royal’s haughty, aristocratic and disenchanted trophy wife, throws extravagant costume parties, which give brief respite from her ennui.
The most sympathetic of the women is Wilder’s wife, Helen, played by American actress Elisabeth Moss, memorable as Peggy Olson in Mad Men. Helen is an earth-mother type and an innocent of sorts. She has two children and is pregnant with a third. Wilder, busy with his schemes, largely abandons her, and she shuts herself in her room, locking the door against the anarchy outside.
Moss tells me she chased the part after reading the script. ‘Ben’s a singular filmmaker. I wanted to play Helen. She’s almost the only one who doesn’t get corrupted. And this has been quite an experience. Sometimes it feels like we’re shooting a war film, with people walking around all bloody and dirty and bruised. Every scene, they pat you down with dirt. It’s a very post-apocalyptic world.’
I watch a scene in which Moss, as Helen, waters a plant on her windowsill and is startled when a bird crashes into the window – a jarring reminder that there is a world outside. Four takes are required to get the scene right: the production assistant hurling the fake gull keeps misjudging, and on one occasion the bird hits the window upside down. Moss takes this in her stride, laughing along with the crew.
Wheatley is a decisive director who works at exceptional speed. ‘I think on the first day we got through 32 set-ups,’ Hiddleston says. ‘You’re just gunning through it; there’s a great momentum. You don’t have time to get complacent – you’re on your toes all the time. Ben is so easy and good-natured, but you finish the day and you have this extraordinary amount of footage. It’s been astonishing.’
Hiddleston enjoyed playing the transformation in Laing, initially detached and immaculate in his suit and crisp white shirts. ‘He wants this blank, fresh, new, clean, modern start in the high-rise,’ he says. Costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux tells me she aimed for a distinctive look for Hiddleston to anchor the film in its period. ‘We want it to be the 1970s, but subtler.’ She based Laing’s grey suit on George Lazenby’s look in his one and only Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, in 1969.
‘Tom seems to have that aura – tall, slim and elegant. He was hesitant about the longer jacket and wider lapels, but it’s totally a 1970s suit. Yet it has a narrow tie, which has to do with Laing feeling constricted.’
Laing’s facade crumbles as chaos spreads. ‘There’s a key scene when he walks out of his flat in a clean shirt,’ Hiddleston says, ‘then thinks again, goes back inside and changes into a dirty one – which he feels better represents who he is becoming. It’s a sort of breakdown, I suppose.’
Laing is a physiologist, so Hiddleston went to watch a real autopsy. ‘I watched them cut a man open,’ he recalls. ‘I couldn’t handle it. What overwhelmed me was the smell. I had to go outside and vomit. Then I went back in and found it fascinating to see the engineering of the human body. But you need a strong stomach for that stuff.’
Ballard’s novel is an extreme piece of work, and when the film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, it divided critics. Thomas welcomes this. ‘I’ve always been led by taste – and I hope my taste is not going to let me down,’ he says. ‘I just try to make a film that’s interesting, high-quality but provocative. I want the material to provoke people.’
‘One never knows what will resonate with an audience,’ Irons says. ‘But I think it’s going to look extraordinary. I can’t think of another film like it.’ He is right. The film pulsates – with energy, colour, strangeness – and its anarchy has that Wheatley-an element of horror. It may well divide audiences, but it will stay with them.
By Mekado Murphy, April 21, 2016
If you’re looking for a project with Tom Hiddleston in it at the moment, you don’t have to look far. Currently on the big screen, he’s playing Hank Williams in the biopic “I Saw the Light.” Currently on the small screen, he plays the hotel manager Jonathan Pine in the mini-series adaptation of John le Carré’s “The Night Manager.” And coming to screens both big and small, he’s playing Dr. Robert Laing in the film adaptation of the satirical J. G. Ballard Novel “High-Rise.” That film, which imagines an apartment building where the wealthy get the best views and services and the poor are relegated to lower floors, is at the Tribeca Film Festival now, and will be on demand April 28 and in theaters May 13.
In an interview this week in New York during the festival, Mr. Hiddleston discussed his work on “High-Rise,” the critical response to “I Saw the Light” and the social media response to a particularly steamy scene in “The Night Manager.” Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.
Q. How did you end up everywhere all of a sudden?
I apologize, unreservedly, first of all, for being everywhere. I’m sure it’s deeply tiresome and nobody wants to ever see my face again. There’s a strange coincidence in that the work of the last 18 months of my life has all been released at the same time. And for me, each piece of work has such integrity and focus. But it must seem different to be in the audience. I do feel very lucky that I’m allowed to do so many different things.
How did you get cast in “High-Rise?”
I knew Jeremy Thomas, the producer, who is a legend in independent filmmaking. He and I made the Jim Jarmusch picture “Only Lovers Left Alive” together. Oddly enough, the director Ben Wheatley and his screenwriter Amy Jump, who happen to be married, told me that when they were conceiving of the cast for “High-Rise,” they had a picture of me on their fridge, which I found initially disconcerting, but actually is a huge compliment. I think Ben and Amy had always imagined me in the role of Laing.
What made you want to do it?
I’m a huge fan of Ben Wheatley’s work. As a British filmmaker, he has a singular vision and voice. The combination of Ben’s taste with Ballard’s sensibility was a thrilling prospect. They share a very sophisticated kind of rebelliousness. They’re not afraid of being provocative or asking quite challenging questions in their work. And “High-Rise” seemed to present that. It is an exploration of human nature in extremis. I think the best drama puts human beings in extreme situations and challenges them.
When did you become familiar with Ballard’s work?
My first introduction came when I was at college and my best friend at the time was a huge fan. He was reading “Concrete Island” and “Cocaine Nights.” He was always very vocal about Ballard’s prescience. As a science-fiction writer, Ballard saw where the world was going. He was fascinated by technology and our obsession with it. “High-Rise” was written in 1975, but if you read it, it feels like today.
How much time was there between shooting “High-Rise” and shooting “I Saw the Light”?
I shot them back to back, so I had a week off in between.
What was it like to go so quickly from this stylized 1970s high-rise building world of the movie to the Southern environs of country music?
It was very strange. I’m happy I had the week off. I finished “High-Rise” on the 25th of August, 2014, and I landed in Nashville on the 2nd of September. And I think it took me a while to shake “High-Rise,” in a way. When you’ve been immersed in one particular environment, it casts a shadow for a time. It was mad, thinking about it. Thank God I went straight to Tennessee, because otherwise I would never have been able to get my head in the game.
With “I Saw the Light,” the critical response to the film was relatively poor. I’m curious what you thought about that?
Well I’d be a fool if I didn’t admit it’s not the best news in the world. But the experience of making that film was so pleasurable that I’ll always have it. The people I’ve met who’ve seen the film have been very generous and have somehow caught a sense of the passion with which it was made. It was a huge labor of love. I spent over five months of my life making it, thinking about it every minute of every day. That’s what it’s like making films. You commit a huge amount of time and energy to make things and it only takes two hours for anyone in the audience, whether they like it or not. But everyone is entitled to their opinion, and the only thing I can control is my commitment to the work.
When “The Night Manager” played in Britain, one of your sex scenes caused a sensation on social media. How did you feel about that?
It was probably very good that I was away in Vietnam making “Kong: Skull Island” when that happened. When we shot the scene, I didn’t see it as being any more or less significant than any other scene in “The Night Manager.” The response is surprising, but it is what it is, I guess. The thing about any love scene, I think the representation is always quite different from the actual experience of making it.
Tom Hiddleston on how he makes his acting choices
‘...Every room, in everyone’s house or flat has a camera, recording what’s going on. The transformation of the home, into a TV studio. A creation of a new kind of reality. A reality that’s electronic.
And perhaps only in the short term, in exactly the same way as, when you first get a camera, you spend your time photographing children playing in a paddling pool. But after awhile, you get more ambitious, and you start taking an interest in the world at large. And I think the same thing will happen – beginning with people endlessly photographing themselves, shaving, having dinner together, having domestic rows – of course the bedroom applications are obvious. But I think they’ll go beyond that to the point where each of us will be at the centre of a sort of non-stop serial, with all kinds of possibilities let in.’
Tom Hiddleston reads an extract from a startlingly prescient interview with J.G. Ballard in Extreme Metaphors at the BFI London Film Festival High-Rise Q&A, 11th October 2015
‘[High-Rise] is made by British people; cast and crew.’
Tom Hiddleston talks High-Rise at the 59th BFI London Film Festival, 9th October 2015
Tom Hiddleston attends the BFI London Film Festival Gala Premiere of High-Rise in Leicester Square, 9th October 2015
Tom Hiddleston smells amazing—overwhelmingly so—as I walk into his hotel room on the 10th floor of the Crosby Hotel in New York City. I can't quite pick out his cologne, but I later described it as "heaven" to everyone I know. "Hello! Tea?" he chirps in his charming British accent as he opens the door for me. Hiddleston has that kind of presence where it's hard to formulate words around him. "Ha ha, it's 4:20 on 4/20 and your fans are called Hiddlestoners," is the first thing I blurt out. I've been waiting to make that joke to him all day, but it falls flatter than I expected. He laughs to be polite, or maybe just out of pity.
The 35-year-old actor is wearing an exceptionally well-fitted blue suit that Wednesday afternoon and gray-framed glasses that add even more allure. Most actors turn out to be smaller in person, but Hiddleston's 6'2" frame—with seemingly mile-long legs—looks even more slender in person. While he's the epitome of dashing, his room is kind of a mess. Fed-Ex boxes are littered all over the place, suitcases are scattered, open, and half-stuffed with half-folded clothes. "Sorry, it's a mess," he apologizes as I navigate my way to the couch. "I'm packing up. I've been traveling for about 10 years." Hiddleston really has been all over the place lately. He's solidified himself in the Marvel Universe as Thor villain Loki (a role he will reprise in 2017's Thor: Ragnarok), just starred as Hank Williams in the biopic I Saw the Light, starred opposite Jessica Chastain in Guillermo del Toro's fantastical period horror Crimson Peak last year, plays a hotel manager-turned-spy in AMC's new TV series The Night Manager, and next year will appear in the new King Kong movie (Kong: Skull Island) with Oscar-winner Brie Larson. So yeah, he's got a lot on his plate.
When we talked, he was floating through Tribeca Film Festival to promote yet another new film of his, High-Rise, director Ben Wheatley's stylish dystopian adaptation of J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel. In the film, Hiddleston plays the middle-class Dr. Robert Laing, who lives in a society where the poor live on the lower levels of a high-rise building while the rich live on top. Laing gets caught in the middle of a class war with his neighbors, played by Sienna Miller, Elisabeth Moss, Luke Evans, and Jeremy Irons, who portrays the building's rich architect and penthouse resident. We talked plenty about High-Rise, but also about his famous Hiddlebum (which serves a symbolic purpose in High-Rise), his love for dancing, and the stomach-churning preparation he had to do for the movie.
You play a doctor in the film. The scene where you tear apart flesh from a skull was kind of hard to watch. You had some horrifying scenes in Crimson Peak as well. Do you get squeamish watching those scenes?
No, but I got squeamish when I was doing my research. I actually attended an autopsy because I knew I was going to have to perform a dissection. I simply had no frame of reference and I wanted to do it properly. I didn't know how to make incisions, so I went to see a forensic pathologist who showed me how to do it, which was quite stomach-churning. But it was fascinating, listening to him talk about the biomechanics of our engineering. As human beings, we often forget that we are machines, made up of machine parts, and if certain things are broken then that will have an effect on our behavior.
I think that scene's a declaration of intent by Ben [Wheatley]. You see Dr. Laing peeling the facial tissue off her head to reveal the blood and the bones beneath. I think that's sort of what Ballard is doing to society. He's saying, "Let me take away the surface and show you the flesh and blood beneath."
Speaking of this movie and Crimson Peak, directors seem to love shooting your bare butt. I'm sure you know the nickname you've been given: Hiddlebum.
It's there. [Points to butt.] And there it is.
It's an Internet sensation.
It's one of those things that I've never really thought about because the nudity has always been part of the story and it's never felt gratuitous. It's always felt as if it's in service of something. In High-Rise, it's quite symbolic. Laing moves into the building to get away from the entanglements of real life. And the first thing he does in this new clean, clinical space is take all his clothes off and sunbathe. And within seconds, that peace and freedom is interrupted. And then he never takes his clothes off again. And that's in the novel. I felt it was kind of important, and honestly, you don't see anything more than you would see if I was just walking down the beach, so I didn't have a problem with it.
The party scenes in this movie are so intoxicating. Did the parties ever go on after the cameras stopped rolling?
The parties were so fun because we would set them up and, of course, there's no real alcohol, but there is real music and Ben would put on music and we'd start dancing. The camera would stay rolling, and he would say, "Crazy, go crazy, dance more crazy, more crazy dancing." He would gently encourage everybody to get a little more wild, but there was something very safe about it.
We're all familiar with your amazing dancing skills. I've got to know if that dream sequence where you're dancing with those flight attendants was your idea.
It actually was my idea. But it wasn't my idea to dance. We shot it at the end of our first day. We were due to wrap at 6 p.m. and at 5:45 they started doing that scene. These flight attendants were walking down the corridor and I was watching it and I said to Ben, "Do you think that Laing should be a participant in his own dream?" And he said, "Well, yeah, it'd be nice to have the option." I asked, "What do you think he should be doing? Is he walking in front of them or behind them?" And then he said, "He should be dancing with them." So we did it, and we did it once. We put on Sister Sledge's "Lost in Music" and we danced down the corridor. It was great.
Do you remember the first moment you fell in love with dancing?
When I first danced ever?
Yeah, when did you discover the rhythm of your body?
[Laughs.] I don't know, actually. I have a very happy memory. My mom used to play the piano for me and my older sister when we were very, very small, about 3 or 4. There was no furniture in the living room of the new house that we had moved into so my sister and I would dance around the living room. It's one of my earliest memories and it's a very happy one. I was just dancing to my mom playing the piano and she had these three things she used to play. And then beyond that, I don't remember dancing or enjoying dancing until I was about 15. I started to go out to parties and playing music and being introduced to girls and wanting to impress them.
If you're a good dancer, it's much easier to get girls...
I couldn't possibly attest to that.
Please.
[Laughs].
You do these stylistic British films and then you're Loki from the Marvel movies. Do you notice the different ways people receive you in different places?
The Marvel films have an extraordinary reach. Loki is the most well-known character I've ever played. But when I was in Louisiana, people had seen me in Coriolanus onstage in London and people have already seen my new TV show, The Night Manager.
You're such a unique chameleon of an actor.
I get huge pleasure from challenging myself and surprising an audience by doing different things. But that's partly because I think all human beings contain enormous range and complexity. We're capable of huge courage, and love, and kindness, but we're also capable of cruelty and inconsistency, and solitude and loneliness, and all these things that we all suffer as much as the next person. My pleasure is trying to express that.
Have you seen that Reductress article about yourself? It's a satirical women's site. I have to show you this article: "9 Times Tom Hiddleston Left You Breathless and Alone in the Woods."
[Scrolls through phone, laughs.] Wow, is it good to leave someone breathless and alone in the woods? I feel like that's a very unkind thing to do to somebody.
Tom Hiddleston explains why independent films deserve your attention (2016)
Tom Hiddleston on the genuine pleasure of cake eating, 9th October 2015
