Tom Hiddleston Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ

loki was yes a comic book villain and somebody with magical powers um and someone who had to these these emotions had to read on a big scale but also if he boiled it down there was something very very kind of human about his about the things he was his grievances thor 2011 directed by kenneth branagh um four months of auditioning i think in 2009 a big leap a big leap for me um from making very small films in the uk and working in the theater and suddenly in the next marvel studios picture after iron man it was it was a moment of adjustment and a moment it kind of just i felt like i won the lottery and it was kind of it had a the whole thing had a a very special um atmosphere i had worked with kenneth branagh before we had acted together in a television series on the bbc called wallander and we had also acted together on stage in london in a chekhov play called ivanov this was my first time being directed by him but we had a we had a kind of understanding as actors and i felt very grateful to him that he had it was able to somehow support my casting to the studio it was a kind of amazing and extraordinary and unprecedented process of working on a project of this scale working with a stunt department and working with visual effects on blue screen and green screen on sets the size of which i had never seen but i was a fan of these movies too and i and it was such a joy for the first time to be inside the process but rather like any any process of making a film in the end it comes down to um the atmosphere you create together as actors and um trying to tell a story and trying to tell it with you know which is interesting and complex and sort of recognizable emotion and hopefully it's funny and it's moving and it's touching and it it kind of it connects with people and i could see from the first script that the story was really there were two stories almost one was a was on this epic spectacular canvas asgard a shining city in the sky with a rainbow bridge and a kind of intergalactic energy that connected it to other universes that transported characters to new worlds and and this was this was a world of gods and monsters a world of from myth and legend and we knew the film had to deliver on that scale but inside it was a very small drama about the family about the father and two sons ken brunner sitting us down and saying actually this is what the film is is it's about this family and a father two sons their mother and they're all sorts of uh fractures if that happens to be the family um the royal family at the top of the universe there's a very very high stakes but ultimately they'll still have the same very relatable very accessible family dynamics as any as any family on the planet and so that became a very interesting psychological thing to explore about a triangle of odin and his two sons thor and loki and loki's sense of being marginalized or or less favored than thor and why that should be was it just because he's the younger brother and therefore won't inherit the throne and all that responsibility and then loki finding out halfway through the film that he's actually adopted and wasn't even supposed to be there and then feeling very betrayed and and um and upset and gives way to all kinds of vulnerability and and anger and grievance and grief laughy son yes why you were knee-deep in your blood why would you take me you were an innocent child no you took me for a purpose what was it tell me and that's when he becomes an antagonist in a way and that's that thor and loki fragment and split off and become adversaries i swear to you mother that they will pay for what they've done today loki why don't you tell her how you've sent the destroyer to kill our friends to kill me what why it must have been enforcing father's last command you're a talented liar brother always have been it's good to have you back and all of that was really rich material um to to get into especially with these actors you know i remember that day that loki finds out he's adopted and it's a scene in the weapons vault and it was a just really it was a very small scene in terms of its kind of structure and on the day kenneth branagh and anthony hopkins and i was there going oh my god working with kenneth branagh and anthony hopkins [Music] and i remember also remember them kind of not able to talk to each other about how much they admired each other so they came to me which is quite sweet and anthony hopkins telling me how much he admired kenneth banner and kenneth spider tell me how much he might answer hop because i felt i was like a vessel for their um for their kind of uh sheepishness about about being able to be honest about that um but it was a big day and it was a big day of big emotion and and um and i remember that scene became the anchor for the whole characterization you know it all makes sense now why you favored thor all these years because no matter how much you claim to love me you can never have a frost giant sitting on the throne of asgard loki was yes a comic book villain and somebody with magical powers um and someone who had to these these emotions had to read on a big scale but also if he boiled it down there was something very very kind of human about his about the things he was his grievances and last but not least my first film with chris hemsworth with whom i made a very fast and and and firm friendship because we playing brothers in this enormous thing and and uh it felt like we were brothers by the end in some way he was the only other person who understood what the experience had been like he was the only other person who i came back and friends of mine were like how was it and i was always hard to explain and there's one person who knows and it was chris and and we've always shared that really because it's a it's kind of a life-changing moment for both of us [Music] avengers the first one 2012 and it was the first big team up superhero film and i remember reading the script and i was thinking okay there are six of them iron man thor captain america black widow hulk and hawkeye and there's one of me and the way this film is structured is the avengers have to win and we all want to root for the avengers and it was so brilliant because it was almost at loki's loki's superpower which is his mercurial shape-shifting and his capacity to manipulate situations his wit his charm his sort of strategic intelligence is used to turn these individual characters against each other um initially so that he has the upper hand and then in the second act they actually all unite as a team to stop him and i remember thinking i've got to really lean into my i've got to really lean into being a pure antagonist in this one um because the balance of the film needs to be such that you just need loki loki needs to yeah i wanted the audience to cheer at the end when he gets hulk smashed and i think they did [Music] anyway you are all of you beneath me i am a god you dull creature and i will not be bullied by that puny god [Music] it was it was an amazing experience because it was the first one and i think there was a sense of with robert and chris hemsworth and chris evans that they were kind of almost relieved to share the responsibility for carrying the film and and a kind of uncertainty about whether we could all pull it off when i guess the following spring in 2012 when the film came out and it kind of became what it became we were all so honoured i guess we were so honored that it seemed to work and it seemed to connect and and that was a very special experience to share with them because the avengers suddenly took occupied a position in the culture which they went on to you know they carried on to the second film and the third film and the avengers are this team that everybody in the world has heard of and i was really i was really honored that i was there kind of for the first the first go-around and they were all so kind and it was a it was a fun team to be around and what i've been amazed by is because i had a little break from the mcu for a bit while it expanded and it seemed to get the mcu seemed to get braver and the film seemed to get bigger and more ambitious and with doctor strange and black panther and the the characters from wakanda and ant-man and the guardians of the galaxy and i and i was sort of watching from the sidelines going i'm so proud of all these actors and what they're doing this is great watching with my popcorn on the opening night and um it was really fun to just feel a part of it in some way um and then it kind of culminates with infinity war and uh an end game where you see all these individual films and the threads of the infinity stones it all kind of crystallizes in and in this moment of of all the avengers against thanos and it was just such an extraordinary experience to be a part of [Music] the rightful king of the ottenheim god of mischief do hereby pledge to you my undying fidelity [Music] what i was used to say was like taika took everything that had been built before and just added all of his own kind of sense of humor and style and um the bells and the whistles and you know there were fireworks and he kind of that he he was able to respect what had gone before and say but this is my reading and it was so playful and so irreverent it was just so fresh and he first my first conversation with taika was um look three movies and loki's always somehow manages to you know pull the wool over thor's eyes and get him to trust him and then betray him what if thor was on to him what if what if thor wasn't gonna be fooled you know fooled again and it was actually loki who was on the back foot and so thor's you know like okay loki i get it you get me to trust you then you betray me fine you can keep playing the same tune if you like i'm gonna go off and do this and loki is almost non-plussed by that it's like what so the shtick isn't working anymore i'm gonna have to think of something else and um and that was really new so so in a way like loki becomes the straight man and and thor becomes like off and thor's playing off that um and loki has to think of like another way a sort of a way of reinventing himself because it isn't working and there's a great scene where loki they sort of need each other to get out of the palace um the grand masters palace uh played by jeff goldblum and um it works for a while and they form this kind of unstable alliance and then loki betrays him again and then thor goes it's not gonna work like that and then thor betrays loki and then sort of stands over him and says you know you just he just never changed do you just the same over and over again and loki is so shocked by it i know i've betrayed you many times before but this time it's truly nothing personal the reward for your capture will set me up nicely everyone for sentiment were easier to let it burn i agree yeah it was just fun to kind of to send up some of the things that i had played with such sincerity in the previous films and taika is you know he comes from a you know background of independent filmmaking and comedy and he improvised a lot and i was really aware on that set of of how kind of bonkers and funny this film is going to be and and chris was so released as well by because i mean everybody knows by now but chris is hilarious and he he always has been um ever since i met him and he was kind of like he felt so free because thor was kind of silly and you know there was a lot of uh a very endearing very endearing goofiness to what he was doing just joining in in that atmosphere was was really fun and also that finally it sort of sets him on a road to to kind of maybe setting down some of the old tricks and some of the old ways of doing things and and reflecting and thinking well maybe you know if i can't provoke my brother anymore maybe i should join him i really enjoyed that that ultimately the the death of his father and the threat to his home he's like you know i'm going to miss who am i without thor i'm going to if thor is destroyed and asgard is destroyed i don't know who i am so maybe i should be there i should help them i think it's really touching i hope in a very unsentimental way i mean you didn't think i'd really come and see you did it this place is disgusting does this mean you don't want my help i couldn't jeopardize my position with the grand master took me time to win his trust he's a lunatic but he can be amenable what i'm telling you is you could join me at the grand master site perhaps in time an accident befalls the grand master and then [Music] what i love about loki the series is it's the loki you know in a world you don't know this is the loki who's mischievous and witty and charismatic and playful and transgressive and disruptive and broken and vulnerable and angry and betrayed and jealous and fractured and all these things the whole cocktail someone who you can't trust ever the trickster but he's always someone who's somehow been in control and he's suddenly in a world where he has no control he's in a institution a bureaucracy called the tva the time variance authority and they are an organization who have been tasked with the order of time reality unfolds as it should according to its predetermined decisions please sign to verify this is everything you've ever said this is absurd sign this too and loki is a character who basically inhabits the idea of chaos and he's up against a bureaucratic institution that inhabits the idea of order and you put those two together and that's where we start so therein lies the drama you picked up the tesseract breaking reality i want you to help us fix it why me i need your unique low-key perspective do i get a weapon yeah it is adorable that you think you could possibly manipulate me and i love that about him so suddenly you strip loki of all the familiar stuff asgard thor green gold helmets magic it's all gone and you put him in a world where he's out of his comfort zone and destabilized and completely confused and it's i really enjoyed seeing how he's almost confronted with having to find a new way through and i hope that um everyone is as excited by as i was only love is left alive jem jamish tilda swinton mia vashikovska john hurt anton yelchin jeffrey wright i was so um surprised and delighted to be asked to be involved in this jim had been writing a film for for a while i think for about um five or six maybe seven years it was really a film about a long-term relationship and that the two people in that relationship happened to be vampires and so if you've made a commitment to be with someone with one person for the rest of your life but the rest of your life is forever how does that change your commitment and um gem and tilde had our long-term long-time friends and collaborators and um and he had very much written the part of eve with tilde in mind and he just needed to find his adam and i remember meeting jim in uh in new york he just kind of pitched me the film he was like so there's adam and eve and they're vampires but they're vegetarians um and uh you know they they said they have like a deal with a doctor at a hospital who can get them the right blood you know and they really like the good quality stuff and it was just so it was such an amazing idea anyway and he said you know adam is like he's an artist and he's a musician and he's um he's younger than eve eve is like 2000 years old and adam is only 500 years old but they're together and they love each other but adam lives in detroit and eve lives in tangier and it's kind of sometimes they spend time apart because he likes to go and make music on his own and and um and he's kind of unhappy he's inclined to the sort of the the the heaviness the spiritual heaviness of of the romantics a pure romantic somebody who feels everything and can um maybe perhaps he's even a little bit depressed and he feels um kind of burdened by the weight of the world on his shoulders and and that you know that life is unfolding reality and and things happening on earth are not going well and and he has a heavy heart um but it's a pure one and it's an honest one and it's kind of got this this quite childlike sensitivity and eve is much wider and deeper and broader and that she can contain him i think it's called only love is left alive for a reason it really is about love and the power of real love and the endurance and durability of it and how strong it is if it's real and that true love is about acceptance and accepting somebody else for everything they are and and they're both artists they both have this appreciation for for literature and art and music and and the finest things and i learned a lot not just about filmmaking from both jim and tilda um but also just about life there's an amazing line that uh eve says to adam when he's feeling a bit low and and and she and and she needs to kind of pull him out of his of of the place he's at in his mind and she says how can you have lived for so long and still not get it this self-obsession it's a waste of living that could be spent on surviving things appreciating nature nurturing kindness and friendship and dancing and as advice goes i don't know if you can get better than that um and then they put a record on and it's um denise lassal the record called trapped by a thing called love and and they dance and they smile and they fall into each other's arms and they just thought it's yeah it's a it's a very close it's a project that's very close to my heart that one for all kinds of reasons yeah crimson peak guillermo del toro this was you know again it kind of came out of nowhere i suddenly got a call um saying you know i was i think i was in north america anyway and they said could you fly to toronto next weekend to meet guillermo del toro and i was like sure and i got on a plane and i met guillermo and he kind of met me straight off the i arrived at the studio straight off the plane and and um we sat down and had a cup of coffee or something and he pitched me this film a gothic romance in the manner of the great gothic romance novels of english literature jane eyre the mysteries of udolpho by anne radcliffe he mentioned bluebeard this there was a trope essentially in literature at a certain time where a young and pure-hearted heroine would meet a tall dark stranger who lived in a big house on the hill and they would fall in love and and then it turns out the tall dark stranger was not as pure-hearted as perhaps she first thought and maybe there are some skeletons in in the closet or in the basement and this was kind of a a kind of a um a literary trope in in in that time and he wanted to use that to make a a version of that sort of film but with a with a different sort of ending the ghosts rather than being somehow metaphorical would be would be real and that he'd be using the same techniques and craft and makeup to to bring these these ghosts from the past to life that he had used in in his other films um particularly patton's labyrinth and the devil's backbone and it had a much more actually quite a feminist inclination you know the the heroine played by mia vashikovska my second time working with mia after only love is left alive she absolutely takes charge of her destiny in this good morning miss forgive the interruption i have an appointment with mr carter everett cushing goodness with the great man himself i'm afraid sir thomas sharp aaron he'll be here shortly thank you you're not late are you he hates that uh not at all in fact i'm a little early oh i'm afraid he hates that too the film is about edith's agency and um i play the tall dark stranger who at first appears to be elegant and charming and full of promise and and kind-heartedness and there's a few secrets in his past and and a sister that uh hasn't been accounted for played by jessica chastain guillermo's knowledge of his craft of the world of literature of the world of gothic romance of cinema of acting of filmmaking is encyclopedic and simply being a part of his crew um was was like was such a pleasure and a privilege because he knows pretty much how to do every single job and his kind of authority over his vision is total and the attention to detail the precision with which he works he understood that you know people do things for the reasons they have and perhaps they're not aware of them but sometimes you know characters make bad choices but there's always a kind of emotional logic so thomas sharp a baronet somebody who had inherited this crumbling mansion um on on a hill in northern england um who seems to be one thing and then is revealed to be another and the one thing that's that's um people may know about working with guillermo is he he writes very long and detailed biographies of each character so when you're working with guillermo he'll he submits you with a typed um almost novella of your character's life before the film starts so you have this whole biography a whole integrated psychology i think what the reason you know the reason he's like this is because this happened when he was a child and he was sent away to this you know to this aunt he lived on the coast and she didn't make nice food and she was abusive and all these kind of details which were so informative what do you think does it look the part it does although it's even colder inside than out i know it's a disgrace we try to maintain the house as best we can but with the cold and the rain it's impossible to stop the damp and erosion and also that set whiz uh i remember we were in a studio in toronto and alladale hall is the mansion that the sharps live in and he built a set that was on three or four stories i think it's one of the biggest sound stages in north america so we had to be there to fit this set inside it and so that when you go upstairs you would actually go upstairs and you when you walked along the landing you could play if somebody was was on the ground floor somebody could be on the third floor landing and you play these it was like a real house and there was one detail i remember that the the plaster of the wallpaper was cracking and if you looked closely the cracks in the plaster spelt out a word and the word was fear and he said no one's ever going to catch that on camera i just want you to know that it's there i thought this guy is just you know where do you get that you know it was it was a really interesting journey to play that kind of archetype from gothic romance yeah archipelago written and directed by the great joanna hogg who really i owe everything to she was the first director who who gave me a job when i left drama school it was a an extraordinary first film for me because joanna almost invented for herself a new way of working which was to take a script which had a story which went from a to z or a to z and she decided to film it or shoot it chronologically and most movies and films are shot out of sequence and the actor's job is to know where you are in the story because you you know each piece of jigsaw puzzle isn't in sequence whereas this was going to be we're going to start at the beginning and finish at the end and we lived through the make the story in sequence and we improvised even though the the order of the scenes was the same we actually improvise within the structure of the scene and it can run for very long takes and very wide shots an archipelago is a collection of small islands scattered in a body of water and they are the archipelago in the film is the isles of silly or the silly isles which are about 25 miles off the coast of cornwall in the uk um so very far south on the way into the atlantic ocean and the location is where this these older children edward is one of them are they're going off for one last family holiday but you realize that the family itself is an archipelago and each member of the family is an island in a group scattered in a body of water and they're not quite connecting all the actors live in the house where the characters live and it's interesting i think the effect is one of you start to do things authentically and do things on camera in a very unaffected way so if a character goes to make some eggs or make a cup of coffee or a cup of tea because you're actually living there all the time you do it you're almost not acting it anymore and and similarly in a very unusual way we started at the beginning and we improvised our way through the whole story it was kind of an extraordinary tuition in the honesty of film acting which i owe to joanna because she she loved the naturalism of the way real life is it gave me a lot of insight into the kind of um discipline that actors have to have about the truthfulness of what they're doing i would one night to see her before i go uh before i go away for 11 months i don't know what's going to happen and um you can split up no we're not going to split up i don't know i don't know what we're going to do i mean it actually frankly would have been nice to have had her here with us now i don't really see why she couldn't have come she couldn't really come here could she because it was like a family holiday edward in archipelago was was almost the first in a line of characters of people who felt which is look i can only tell looking back is characters who felt that they were somehow misunderstood or slightly isolated within their own family and it was quite strange because i remember shooting archipelago just before i went to los angeles to start making the first thor film and there were these strange connections i started making between edward and loki which were they're both siblings and they both feel misunderstood by their parents and they're completely different films um i mean the idea of loki turning up in archipelago is a puzzling one um or the idea of edward turning up in thor with a kind of a scarf blowing in the wind you know it's kind of fished out of water but um weirdly i was i was kind of playing in the same territory psychologically which is an interesting thing at the time the deep blue sea we made it in the late fall early winter of 2010 directed by terence davis and starring rachel weiss and simon russell beale and it's based on a play by terence ratigan is a very moving portrait of a um a woman who is trying to leave a very fragmented marriage and moving into a an affair with a younger man in in in london in the 1950s in the wake of the second world war and she falls in love with a a young bomber pilot called freddie page who i played she feels slightly stranded between two men who offer her different things it's really a film about unrequited love and and um or or the ways in which we misunderstand each other in our attempts to love terence davis is a very poetic british filmmaker and i found terence very sensitive and caring and kind and his knowledge of the perspectives of these three people he was very attentive to both to rachel and to simon and to myself and understood that there really are no villains characters singing in pubs is almost a signature piece for terrence davies because he remembers in as a child growing up in liverpool that in those years after britain was a not an easy place to be because so many of the cities had been ravaged by the second world war and communities have been diminished and and the economy had taken such a hit and the 50s were quite hard people to get through but he remembers as a child at a certain time of night walking past the local pubs and people would go to the pub and they would sing together as a group act and so it almost in in the terence davis thing to have people singing in pubs and i loved that aspect of the filming they're seeing a joe stafford song called you belong to [Music] me and i think in the film if i remember it it blends into them dancing together and having a very very close intimate moment which is almost about the poignancy of being alive they're so they're so happy to be alive and i think freddie is so feels so privileged that he's one of he was one of his number in the royal air force to come back and he's made it out and to your second point i think that's why he's so angry is because there's a moment where hester rachel's character makes an attempt on her own life which is unsuccessful and freddie is so enraged that she could be so careless with with life but he also doesn't have the sensitivity to contain her anxiety in that moment and in that use in his anger you suddenly see all of his war trauma that actually hasn't been hasn't been able to unpack i know that i'm going to die just accept but it isn't your fault it really isn't freddy you can't help who you are i can't help what i am well i'm not carrying the can for this old darling no dice i'm not the villain of the piece no one is saying you are haven't you read what i wrote i'm not blaming you i was the one who wanted to wait for the divorce you didn't you jumped that particular fence now i never gave myself a big build-up you knew exactly what you were getting yes i knew the risk i was taking and i took it oh my god

Channel: GQ

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Keywords: celebrity, gq, gq magazine, gq tom hiddleston, iconic, iconic characters, loki, loki gq, tom hiddleston, tom hiddleston 2021, tom hiddleston avengers, tom hiddleston character, tom hiddleston characters, tom hiddleston gq, tom hiddleston iconic, tom hiddleston iconic characters, tom hiddleston interview, tom hiddleston loki, tom hiddleston movie, tom hiddleston movies, tom hiddleston thor

Id: P9SnkUxr8F4

Length: 39min 4sec (2344 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/kazmological]

Thank you - this was a terrific set of responses and musings. Love how Tom's brain works - thoughtful, very perceptive, and eloquent ... also self-deprecating and funny! Would've loved hearing him speak on 'Hollow Crown' and 'Coriolanus', and 'Night Manager'. Or, just keep talking and musing :D

[u/sodascouts]

Love this so much but no Henry V or Jonathan Pine? Still, it was 40 minutes of Tom sharing fascinating insights so I can't complain!

I'd never thought about the similarities between Edward from Archipelago and Loki.