The wind is rising, the sky is darkening and there is no sign of Tom Hiddleston. Somewhat bizarrely, the 35-year-old actor has suggested a crossroads in north London for our early-January rendezvous, but it is 15 minutes past the agreed time and the roads stretching north, south, east and west are deserted as the sun sinks below the horizon. A dot appears, moving rapidly. It elongates into a rangy figure and an arm shoots skywards, waving effusively. From 40 yards away, the apologies begin and the sprint winds down, until he is standing beside me, a firm handshake accompanied by an even firmer shoulder clamp. If steam plumes from his mouth, it is because it is bitterly cold, not because he is out of breath: “Good job I’ve been training with the SAS,” he says, and the signature grin — wide, white, impossibly winning — lights up his lean face.
Ten minutes later, we are tucked into an upstairs corner of Hiddleston’s favourite coffee shop. Affectionate catch-ups with the staff and a local handyman, who is drilling into a wall, have been completed, and he is now explaining to me that he has lived nearby since 2011, but has been away for several weeks filming Kong: Skull Island in Australia and Hawaii. In a couple of days, he will jet off to Vietnam to conclude shooting the king of monsters’ $190m reboot.
“I’m quite certain I’m not fit enough to be in the SAS, but I’ve made strides,” he laughs, his battered motorcycle jacket draped over his chair and a grey V-neck T-shirt straining to accommodate all those muscles.
“We’ve had a lot of ex-military on the stunt team, and I’ve been trained rigorously by those people. I started about three months before filming. A lot of running. A lot of metcon, which is aerobic workout and resistance. And a lot of circuit training to get my stamina up. My character is incredibly resourceful. Like a coiled spring. Highly skilled. There’s plenty of running through jungle terrain, rescuing people who need rescuing. Sorry I’m being unspecific.”
The need to be circumspect renders Hiddleston, who is renowned for his work ethic and graciousness, genuinely heavy-hearted, for he approaches an interview as he does any other job: determined to give it his all and to please while doing it. Sipping his coffee and stealing a nibble of lemon drizzle cake, he starts again, choosing his words carefully.
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“It’s set in the 1970s, in the wake of Vietnam. A disparate group of professionals is assembled to go to an island in the South Pacific for reasons that remain mysterious. I play a British SAS tracker who specialises in jungle recovery. His particular skills are required. He’s not quite sure why, but you can probably guess.”
Enticing as Kong: Skull Island is, with Hiddleston joining a cast that includes Samuel L Jackson, John C Reilly, John Goodman and last weekend’s best actress Oscar winner, Brie Larson, its chest-thumping release lurks far over the horizon, in March 2017. No longer a star of the future, though, Hiddleston is right here, right now: he can currently be seen in the title role of the BBC’s John le Carré adaptation of The Night Manager; out in May is the biopic I Saw the Light, in which he is terrific as the singer-songwriter Hank Williams; and the director Ben Wheatley’s ferocious take on JG Ballard’s prescient 1975 novel High-Rise will ram-raid cinemas soon, with Hiddleston’s Dr Robert Laing acting as our eyes in the storm.
Laing is an upwardly mobile doctor who resides on the 25th floor of a state-of-the-art London tower block. When technology fails, petty grievances rapidly escalate into animalistic violence. The residents, whose wealth can be measured according to the position of their pens in this vertical zoo, begin to engage in literal class warfare.
“It’s provocative, and deliberately so,” says Hiddleston. “I’m aware that it’s like hot mustard in that it has divided people [at the Toronto and London film festivals], but the book opens with the line: ‘Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.’ Some people are shocked by that.
“But I think the film is true to Ballard, and at the same time a Ben Wheatley film. It has a very British sense of humour, with a uniquely British underbelly of dark, troubling material, which is absolutely part of the history of our culture and our film-making. Ben’s directing heroes are Lindsay Anderson and Stanley Kubrick and Ken Russell. There is a mischief in his work, a visual and thematic rebellion.”
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In Laing, Hiddleston has found his most perfect part to date. Put another way, it is the summation of his work thus far; the actor himself notes that Laing is an “unquiet spirit”, camouflaged by a surface of “sophistication and ease and elegance and grace”, and the same can be said of his previous characters.
“You mustn’t allow your head to be turned by stuff that doesn’t matter
In Unrelated, Hiddleston’s 2007 film debut for Joanna Hogg, his seemingly confident teen is undone when his relationship with his father disintegrates. Loki, the loquacious god of mischief he first played in Thor and returned to in Avengers Assemble and Thor: The Dark World, cloaks envy and vulnerability in megalomania. His jocund F Scott Fitzgerald in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris is drowning in booze; the bon vivant Freddie Page in Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea is spiritually desolate; and noble Captain Nicholls in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse stands in death’s shadow. Factor in the Byronic figures he played for Jim Jarmusch in Only Lovers Left Alive and for Guillermo del Toro in Crimson Peak, and a theme emerges.
It is tempting, of course, to equate work and life, to point to Hiddleston’s education at Eton, Cambridge (a double first) and Rada, to his exquisite deportment, garrulous articulacy and unfaltering courtesy, and to imagine some terrible darkness within. Is there not, after all, a hint of rictus to that charismatic grin? But while his parents divorced when he was 13 and he admits to having experienced life’s “cruelty” as well as its “beauty”, it is hard to spot a flaw in his generosity of spirit or a shred of inauthenticity to his sincerity. Hiddleston is, according to all who have worked with him, a good egg.
Exhibit A: today, each of his answers is exhaustively detailed, yet still he returns to earlier questions, doggedly determined to furnish me with fuller answers. (Two days later, I receive an email expanding upon one point that he worries was not explained as comprehensively as I might have hoped.) Exhibit B: when production wrapped on High-Rise, he presented cast, crew, publicists, runners and, presumably, the local traffic warden with a mug and a note to thank them for their efforts. This anecdote reaches me from another source, for Hiddleston is not the type to blow his own trumpet.
Furthermore, it seems fame has not triggered a dark side in him, despite his vertiginous rise. Asked if he is now tired of the role of the demigod Loki and the army of teenage fans — “Hiddlestoners” — who shriek at his every tweet, he smiles warmly. “I feel so grateful,” he says. “It afforded me an extraordinary opportunity at a particular time. It’s a great character. Lots of depth, lots of fun. The way he caught fire in the imagination of people is still completely surprising and gratifying.”
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Good job, too, for Loki will be back in a third Thor movie, Ragnarok, though Hiddleston insists he has not yet seen a script (“God’s honest, I haven’t anything to say”). In the meantime, he is intent on using his increasing clout to attract opportunities, on stage, in television and film.
“You just have to focus on the work and not allow your head to be turned by stuff that doesn’t matter,” he shrugs. “The work is the only thing you can control. Everything else —how I am perceived by anyone else — I can’t control.” He pauses, ponders. “You can’t prepare yourself for loss of anonymity until it happens, so there’s no question that initially it’s confusing. But, I hasten to add, there’s nothing more boring than listening to actors whingeing about fame. It’s allowed me to do really interesting work.”
That work includes a stunning return to stage acting in 2013, playing a complex Coriolanus at the Donmar Warehouse, and being party to the creative process on both Kong: Skull Island and The Night Manager, the latter scoring him his first executive-producer credit. It also entails his committed portrayal of Hank Williams, who grew up dirt poor, without a father and affected by spina bifida, but who went on to become a star. Williams turned to alcohol and drugs to cope with fame. The film is a somewhat staid affair, the beats overly familiar after the new rhythms laid down by the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy and Aaron Sorkin’s exploration of the Apple iCon Steve Jobs, but Hiddleston is electric. “I threw my whole soul at it,” he says, recounting how he moved in with the recording artist Rodney Crowell in Nashville for a month and became a travelling player on tour by way of preparation.
With acting chops such as these, plus that new gym-bunny physique and the darkness locked inside a carapace of civility, it is little wonder Hiddleston is being tipped as the next James Bond.
The grin flashes. “Time magazine ran a poll and there were, like, 100 actors on the list, including Angelina Jolie. But, yes, it’s nice to be included in the 100. I’m a huge fan of the series. We all went to see Spectre when we were shooting Skull Island in Hawaii. I simply love the theme tune, the tropes and the mythology. I love the whole thing. If it ever came knocking, it would be an extraordinary opportunity.”
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There is the surface decorum. Now for the inner grit: “And I’m very aware of the physicality of the job. I would not take it lightly.”
High-Rise opens on Mar 18