Tom Hiddleston on making movies, surviving Hiddleswift and why he’s taking a year off
TOM Hiddleston survived Hiddleswift, venomous spiders and snakes in Australia to make another blockbuster movie. So why’s he taking a year off?
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WHEN he flew into Australia in January of last year, headed for the Gold Coast Hinterland where Mt Tamborine would double for a mysterious slice of the South Pacific in Kong: Skull Island, Tom Hiddleston was given a full safety briefing.
“Red-bellied black snakes, brown snakes, funnel-web spiders ...” he recounts.
“I know you guys are used to all that stuff, but for this urban dwelling Londoner, that was a revelation.”
When he flew back in again in July, there was no safety briefing for the venomous creature he now faced: the celebrity relationship.
Hiddleswift — the coupling of Hiddleston with pop star Taylor Swift — lasted all of three months, from mid-June until, well, probably the point Swift flew out of Australia, leaving Hiddleston to work on Thor: Ragnarok.
But it seemed to engulf all of 2016 for the English actor, who admitted to this month’s GQ magazine that he was “surprised that it got so much attention”.
What’s not so surprising now is, besides seeing Kong and Ragnarok out into the world, Hiddleston is planning to take much of 2017 off.
“I’m taking a bit of a breather, because I’ve been running quite hard for five or six years and I just need to check in with stuff at home,” he says.
When asked if the intense spotlight of 2016 might have contributed to his desire to hide away this year, he considers for a moment then replies: “Honestly, it is I have been working relentlessly. I’ve spent so much time away from home and after a while you realise there are other things in life that you need to check in with, like family and friends ... those things are just as important. So it’s really that.”
The last six years have been undeniably huge for 36-year-old Hiddleston.
Regular work on British TV and stage switched gear into movie stardom via his much-loved Marvel role as Thor’s mischief-making brother Loki, backed up by great performances in The Deep Blue Sea, War Horse, Only Lovers Left Alive, Crimson Peak, TV’s The Hollow Crown and miniseries The Night Manager (the latter scoring him a statuette at last month’s Golden Globes).
But few of those projects would have taken the toll Kong: Skull Island did.
The film’s cast — a sprawling, diverse and entertaining crew including Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson, John Goodman, Tian Jing and John C. Reilly — spent six months trudging across the swamps, rainforests, mountains and caves of Mt Tamborine, northern Vietnam and Oahu to give the 100-foot ape a new lease on cinematic life.
Hiddleston swears he didn’t go Apocalypse Now halfway down the river, but laughingly admits “it was really nice when we finally wrapped to fly home and sleep in my own bed and put my clothes in the wash”.
The Brit was one of the first to board the adventure, meeting with director Jordan Vogt-Roberts while in Nashville working on his blues guitar for the Hank Williams biopic I Saw the Light.
Hiddleston has no qualms drifting between big popcorn movies and indie cinema — “A varied diet is healthy for all of us,” he says — and is a film buff with “a soft spot” for King Kong, so the director’s pitch couldn’t have hit the spot any better.
“Jordan said, ‘I want to make this like the movies we loved growing up, like Indiana Jones, like Jurassic Park and those ’70s war movies where you see a group of soldiers taken to the edge. And in amongst all that adventure and the rock and roll atmosphere of the ’70s, put your favourite prehistoric monster in the middle of it’,” Hiddleston recalls.
“I was like: That’s a movie I wanna be in.”
Hiddleston plays Captain Conrad, a tracker recruited to lead a mapping mission on the uncharted Skull Island. When things go ape, Conrad’s particular set of skills are called into action.
Though his self-described “creature of the theatre” background doesn’t scream action man, Hiddleston revelled in the role.
“I loved embracing the true blue physicality of the hero,” he says.
“Conrad is a former SAS specialist in jungle survival and the recovery of lost soldiers. He starts the film quite lost and world weary, but he is so highly skilled and knows his way around the jungle and a sharp object ... That physicality was new for me and I really enjoyed it.”
The zenith of his heroism is a rocking sequence in which he lets rip wearing a gas mask and wielding a samurai sword: “It was like being a kid again,” he raves.
Even more so than The Avengers, Kong was a team effort on screen and off. With Larson taking charge, this posse of actors a long way from home would spend their weekends doing “karaoke, go-karting, barbecues and game nights”.
That camaraderie, Hiddleston happily notes, really translates on screen.
Hiddleswift aside, Hiddleston’s second tour of duty Down Under in 2016 holds equally cheery memories.
It wasn’t as “blindingly, brutally hot” shooting Thor: Ragnarok from July through October as it was making Kong in summer, and the longer stay allowed him to venture south to Chris Hemsworth’s Byron Bay pad a couple of times.
He also loved watching Hemsworth’s comedic potential unleashed. “This will be, without question,” he says, “the funniest Thor you’ve ever seen.”
And the days the production filmed on the streets of Brisbane are, as far as fan interaction goes, on equal footing with the first time Hiddleston hit San Diego Comic-Con as Loki.
“We shut down the central business district and it was insane — in the best way. Everybody showed up to watch and between takes you could run over and say hello. People were so enthusiastic and patient and it made it feel like a real event.”
He pauses, then laughs.
“Even Sir Anthony Hopkins said it made him feel like a rock star.”
KONG: SKULL ISLAND OPENS MARCH 9
THOR: RAGNAROK OPENS OCTOBER 26
Originally published as Tom Hiddleston on making movies, surviving Hiddleswift and why he’s taking a year off
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