Tom Hiddleston In Conversation | BAFTA New York

here's a quote from Laurence Olivier that reminds me of your work I'm not God I'm not kidding I came upon this quote and I thought this really sounds like your work so it's a quote that that Olivier wrote and said that an actor should be going for the jugular he should be like a lion a leopard but also a serpent now to that I say that sounds like your characters in high-rise in the night manager which just had an amazing finale last night on the BBC absolutely it sounds like Hank Williams it sounds like Henry v it sounds like Loki the god who would be king of us all I'm wondering if when you're preparing for a role if you're thinking does this one go for the jugular or should I let this one wash over me as you're approaching it which approach do you like if I let anything wash over me my life would be much easier um I don't I can't explain it I tend to I tend to go for the jugular every time can everyone hear me first of all it was that great just the first you know theatrical acoustics stage train I I don't know how to do it any other way actually and I don't know that I bought I don't know that I've ever been able to to do anything III say it as a syllabus I'm aware that it can be a strength but it can also be a weakness because the focus is obsessive and and so when I go for something I go for it at the expense of everything else and I I love what I do simply and I I feel so lucky that I'm allowed to do it and that I did get to do it for a living and I'm cinema and theater have had such a profound effect on me in my life and and so I always every time a new script or a new role comes along I am motivated by the thought that I will I won't forgive myself if I don't give it everything and but I do try to choose different kinds of things because I'm interested in in the diversity of people and though and the complexity of people and the multiplicity we contain within it so I really think the thing that unites us all in the world is that we are constantly in constant and that inconstancy in that contradiction is something that I've always tried to explore with my characters because I think we do we do things that the contrary contradicts ourselves all the time there's a the Walt Whitman poem the song of myself' I am large I contain multitudes I contradict myself and sorry I'm digressing but yes jugular every time we've had the pleasure of sitting the last few nights talking about I saw the light which we'll talk about more in depth in a little bit but something you said really struck me which was at about 10 years ago you had the realization that life is not a dress rehearsal that this was really this is time to kind of get serious I'm wondering what it was that preceded that epiphany and how it's a bird you on wow I think I had I've been very diligent in my training and tried to listen to the advice of all my teachers and instructors as as a student as an academic as a training actor and I always wanted to do right by them and I found myself is a very scary moment when you're a young actor most people find themselves in their early 20s and everything is possible and nothing is guaranteed and you start auditioning and you if you're lucky enough you have an agent and you start auditioning and they send you everything from period drama to casualty to Dairy Milk commercials yep I went up for a Dairy Milk commercial when I was and and you are thrown into the business and thrown into it at the deep end and there's no time for doubt or failure except routinely that's what happens to all of us and I was so I perhaps was too careful in auditioning and I would always get close to to landing roles and to booking jobs and I would never quite get there and it's it's a I mean that this is a universal experience for all creative people certainly actors is that the constant rejection at the beginning and you had to get used to it and you have to get thick-skinned about it and I was so exhausted by I was I trying to sort of because at first you take it very personally and I thought well no one's like no one's gonna no one's going to help me get that the only person who could do this is me and I started preparing in a different way and and I sort of stepped up to the plate a little better I think because I could feel time sliding away and and I wasn't getting on with life I just was sort of stuck in this rut of neither acting nor doing anything else and the experience of being in your twenties is so energetic and I felt so stagnant actually so I just kind of changed everything up and and it worked I'm lucky now at about that time you work a CEO in a fellow with Giotto lagea for and Ewan McGregor and you play dual roles in Cymbeline you got the Olivier Award for your stage work for Best Newcomer at that point did you suddenly think oh I may get everything I hoped for and were you kind of fearful of what would come next actually that was the moment I remember I was coming off a tour of Cymbeline for cheek-by-jowl the theatre company and we toured all over the world but she came here in in May of 2007 right down right back meow and they've been to Moscow and Paris and wreak havoc and Milan and Frankfurt and and then be later did a stint at the Barbican and he finished in Madrid and I remember I would done six months of touring this show and I was so tired and I all I wanted to do was just chill and my agent called me said he got an audition for a fellow next week you know they go okay but I knew he said Michael Grandage is directing it Chua tell Ejiofor was playing Othello you and McGregor is playing Iago and Kelly Reilly is playing Desdemona and I'd read this play at a level English and I reread it and I knew for some reason it for the first time how to play Cassio and I didn't want to leave anything to chance so I just learnt the entire part before the audition and my audition took 10 minutes and Michael Grandage still remembers that audition he said you came in because I knew that everyone was going up for that it was such an amazing opportunity and Othello it was it was a real moment as a very happy time it was a great production principally because of chouet l was so magnificent in the in the title role and he led from the front and so many fortuitous things happened as a result of that production I remember this we were all quite ready very rarely we were we felt very ready to go to open on art the day of our dress rehearsal and we had the show was ready to go with the last thing we need really actually needed an audience at that point and Michael Grandage said to the company would you mind if I opened the house to people in their final year at drama school so third year students from Rada from lambda from central from from the Drama Centre and we were like no not at all and it was a sort of nice way of saying free tickets because they couldn't probably working to get tickets and then he said you mind if I ask my a friend of mine called kenneth branagh to come and see it and so we all went okay you know like the most sort of probably the man who's had the greatest impact on the playing of shakespeare of his generation and he knew michael grandage because michael before taking over the Donmar Warehouse had directed can in Richard the third at the Sheffield crucible Abbey won't be a short you're fine yeah absolutely no worries and remember so Kenneth Branagh came to the dress rehearsal and he really enjoyed it and the next morning I received a phone call from my London agent saying um Ken is doing a radio play for the BBC of Cyrano de Bergerac and he's played Cyrano and he would like you to play Christian and so that's how I met Ken and then the following year Tom Stoppard also came to see a fellow and he had written and the adaptation of Chekhov's Vaughn off to be directed by Michael Grandage in which Kenneth Branagh was starring and they all turned to me and said you have to play the doctor so I was like okay and at the same time the BBC's carthan director it's time with the script for Wallander and I remember embarrassingly in bashfully a meeting can Branagh at the de costume fitting and he said so I'm calling this my Hiddleston year and I just thought well don't [ __ ] it up basically mercifully I didn't so and then and then we became firm friends and and and that was and he invited me to audition for Thor and it was a very open net they were casting they both that Marvel wanted young actors to play the principal roles who had no previous attachment in the audience's mine and I got cast as Loki and that was really that was my foot in the door so to speak I just love that your connection with Branagh expands both stage and radio and TV because of Wallander and then film it's like the only thing you guys didn't do together was like The Telegraph that you're like you know that you guys hit every every possible medium and is that story true about how you grab the water bottle as it went you had heard that Branagh was was directing Thor you wanted as to as your fake prop hammer and went up there and said you know think of me as Thor's that's true story we live in a world that is ruled by the Marvel Universe now and and there was a time when they made one film and it was Iron Man and so we were all in in during the theatrical run of even off in the West End it was very exciting we were just as a company we were very excited on behalf of on his behalf that he had managed to land this huge directing gig which none of us knew about and somebody told me Jeana Vicki who I had most of my scenes with was playing his wife and she told me that Ken had got this huge directing gig and so as this the Chekhovian doctor in that play I had longer hair and a goatee and wire-rimmed spectacles and a pocket watch and you know it looked like a very Slavic Russian doctor from the 19th century I as a joke in the interval I picked up this empty water cooler and run up to Ken's dressing him and pretended to be swinging Thor's hammer it's probably ill-advised but I did it anyway and and then actually that's when he said well actually don't joke there's a couple of good parts in there so yeah that's I came about well we're very lucky that you didn't get there and you got loki because really it i think that the key to so much of whether it's brits richard the third or is any sort of a the villain needs to be somebody that is playful and devious and you find so many rich layers of new odds within loki what was the key to him for you to that character well i can and i kind of used Shakespearean villains as a touchstone it was a very red like quite a Shakespearean script and the journey of thor actually was very similar to the journey of prince how in the Henry the fourth and never the third of the trilogy which obviously he knew very well having played how the never the fifth many times and and so Thor goes from a hot-headed impetuous young prince into being a into being worthy of of his title and similarly we tried to think about the the immaculate and terrifying talent for improvisation that's account two like Iago has someone who can think on his feet and manipulate every situation to his advantage we talked about Casius in Julius Caesar who is characterized as having a lean and hungry look we talked about the brothers in King Lear Edmund and Edgar Edgar being the favored son of Gloucester and Edmund being the bastard son who is driven by some sort of terrible lack of self-esteem to take his father and his brother down so those seemed to be interesting aspects to steal from Shakespeare really and then I just have to remind myself I was playing the god of mischief which is a hell of a thing to be god of actually you know there's gods of war and thunder and justice and and this guy was the god of mischief so I I knew I had to have as much fun as possible you know the devil plays all the best tunes and it became that became a cocktail and weirdly from those beginnings he he just emerged he emerged in costume fittings he emerged as I dyed my hair black and I have read the first script and I thought there was a fascinating in inside this extraordinary lavish visual effects spec you know action spectacular there was a very simple human drama about a father and two sons and so on that that bran had talked to us about - Anthony Hopkins and and Chris Hemsworth and myself it was a real we really worked on that that inside you know rainbow bridges and journeys through space and time that there was actually something people could latch on to that was human and real it's amazing watching that scene back by the way I haven't seen that so it seems like a long time ago one of the great things that that hold up about it though is that obviously the best the best villains don't think of themselves as villains I mentioned Richard the third a couple mins ago he thinks he's doing the right thing you know and in the Marvel Universe as well it's the same type of dynamic to them they're not the villain they're the one who's just have a different point of view and the one that everybody should listen to right but every villain is a hero in his own mind and I really latched on to that you know someone who's actually trying to do the right thing it just makes bad choices even in Avengers he's still trying to make him make the right choice possible exception of taking over the world with his photo fascistic tendency yeah I still it's funny I haven't played him for three years but I still have a soft spot for him I still kind of yet I was gonna ask if a lot of people who have a lot of actors who have a connection to a character like that sometimes when they come around again you're something oh they almost think of him as if he's like another guy like oh that gets nice he's gonna be coming around again a nice guest in the house is gonna be Loki he's gonna be coming around you kind of have that feeling that he's sort of like this other guy at this other point yeah it's so odd because you never so rare as an actor to have a chance to go back to a character sometimes you know especially you create a character and you hope that he makes an impact or people find a connection people can recognize something in him that's entertaining or truthful and you never very rarely dude get a chance to go back and I've gone back to him a couple of times and it is odd it's like hello darkness my old friend you know yeah we'll see we'll see nothing ends in the Marvel Universe you mentioned the holocron which is amazing the BBC production with the hollow crown which is so beautiful your approach to parental becomes Henry v what was your approach to Henry v I think that performance and that particular production is so beautiful and so exquisite what was your approach to henry v yeah he's a fascinating time III the hardest thing about that challenge was doing Henry and/or house journey in Reverse because of the because of the schedule of Simon Russell Beale who played Falstaff and we had to shoot Henry v first and then shoot Henry the fourth and actually we because of our locations we ended up shooting the end of Henry the fifth at the very beginning and I kind of I played the character in reverse order so by the end the very last scenes are shot in a 15-week engagement were when Prince how ilysm is it his youngest and most immature and playful in the in the tavern with Falstaff but I'd already I'd already done the Crispin's Day speech I'd already done once more unto the breach dear friends and that was interesting just it's the s theatre differs from film as you always shoot films out of sequence as I'm sure you all know but but sometime buddy were the part as complex as that not to have experienced the beginning before I got to the middle of the end was fascinating and and it was an interesting time it was with Richard Eyre directed Henry for Part one and two and Thea Sharrock directed and with the fifth and we decided that they had to speak to our own even though it was part of a tetralogy that was was produced by Sam Mendes and being broadcast on the BBC as a celebration of British culture in conjunction with the 2012 Olympics we felt that Henry the fifth is is a play about war overwhelmingly if you read it again it is a meditation on the spiritual cost of warfare and responsibility and and an Henry as a as a general in a way a leader of his army as well as a king is the most interesting psychological aspects of that play are about the the toll on his soul or and the guilt and the shame and and you know there's a fantastic soliloquy upon the King let us our hearts our lives lay on the king we must bear all and it we decided that rather than it being a kind of rousing endorsement of warfare as as actually Olivier Olivier edited out some of the more brutal aspects of that he cut out the speech of Henry before the French before the castle of Harfleur went where henry v has some horrible things he says we're gonna your father's taken by their silver beard and their motor Reverend heads dashed to the walls you're naked infants spitted upon pikes he's these are all things he's threatening to do unless they open the gates and it's it's Marshall and it's ugly and Olivier in forty-five necessarily cut those speeches from the play so that it would be a more of a galvanizing and rousing emotional appeal to to everybody which the country needed and we felt the you and I that we had to reinvention to the plays really quite balanced debate about warfare and that in the way we shot it as well we discussed that we lived in but we had a very limited budget but when we lived in a world in the wake of films like Saving Private Ryan and gladiator and and films like that changed the way audiences relate to action and action sequences is that people now demanded more verite in their action sequences they wanted to get up close to be able to feel the intensity of the action and so we tried to shoot the the battle sequences in a different way but I loved playing it I mean the the privilege of saying those words on the film is very rare and and I love doing it it's a great experience you mentioned darkness a couple of minutes ago are you have a talent for that for a sort of a rule weary morbidity a heaviness obviously in addition to Loki there's only lovers left alive which I love there's crimson peak you actually do have a very funny talent for comedy though I frankly I love I love your Midnight in Paris you're f scott Fitzgerald and actually if anybody ever saw those Loki comedy central bits that you did in preparation for the dark world where you're dealing with a quartet of children just as formidable as the Avengers um you do have a tell would you like to do more comedy which lets do more like love to do more comedy really worth yes over something I've been asking to do for a while I keep telling everybody who you know when I'm working up I've got a couple of agents who so scare through scripts and new material to send to me and they always will send me the darkest time in really dark so I would like guys come on romantic comedy that's hilarious that's what I was up for but yeah I've loved I love doing comedy you know there's a little bit of comedy a sort of surrealist comedy and high-rise and there are funny bits in in I saw the light but that's what started for me as a child you know I just like I I was if I was ever exhibitionist it was in the aim of making people laugh you know it was it was pratfalls and falling off chairs and there's nothing like getting it getting a laugh actually so yes more comedy please yeah do you remember your first the first production that you saw live stage production that you saw as a child I was taken I was taken to see pantomime so that was probably the first Christmas time and my grandfather my mother's father had a wonderful tradition of gathering up his brood you know with all the troops all of his children and all of his children's children at Christmas time to go and watch something and I remember seeing the Wind in the Willows at the National Theatre I think Ian McKellen played badger I think a my phone maybe maybe he play he was definitely Captain Hook and Peter Pan and then I remember very clearly my first Shakespeare production was a Midsummer Night's Dream at the Barbican Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by Adrian noble with Alex Jennings as Oberon and it was so it was so joyful and so fun and I didn't know the story the first time I had my head sort of blown clean away in the theatre was a production by Richard Eyre of John Gabriel Balkman the Ibsen play with Paul Scofield and Vanessa Redgrave and Eileen Atkins and I remember I was taken to see it by an English teacher and it was the Littleton theatre at the National in London and in the interval he caught lead there were a couple of us there and he called the society said you never saw a live a you never saw keel good he never saw Richardson you are watching Paul Scofield one of the greatest actors of all time in what will be his last performance treasure it and it was magnificent I mean it was there was something people still don't really feel they worth close to Scofield and or that they understood his talent and how he pulled out what he pulled out but I was aware I was in the presence of greatness and it was a film about a family in pain and Vanessa Redgrave was so good and I in Atkins as well and that was one of those life-changing moments where I felt the power of dramatic storytelling to unite a group of strangers you know I was in the National Theater with all these grown-ups and and and it seemed when we sat down at 7:30 like a social occasion and by 10:30 we all left bonded by a common experience I really understood this sort of that the power that the theater and Cinemark and I along those lines one of the reasons you did deep Lucy the Terrence Avis Holmes which I love is that it was an opportunity for you to do something about love at a time that you're doing a lot of sort of things with a lot of fighting in a lot of either violent stuff either on stage or on screen and it was opportunity to sort of explored the idea of love what did you what did you learn from that production and going into it that Terrence Davies film I loved making the deep blue sea um I loved working with Rachel of ice she's such a an instinctive warm actor she's so generous and so compassionate so human and for both of us it was a story about a woman who was trapped between two men neither of whom could give her what she needed so you know her first husband it was kind and considerate but but without passion and Freddy page I was playing a by a former bomber pilot was full of passion but without the sophistication or the constancy and I always read that as you know he just he was one of those guys in in the Battle of Britain who was who was so he was given definition by his courage and by the experiences of being a pilot and after the war didn't know how to readjust and so he actually you know as Terence Davis said to me you can't put an entire nation in therapy and that he was basically self-medicating going to the pub every night and singing and drinking and and and therefore couldn't couldn't meet Rachael's character Hester at the level she wanted so actually it's a tragedy of a love triangle where everybody needs love from the other that can't be requested and it was a fascinating thing to explore because that's so Terence as well anyone he knows Terence Davis's work he feels that so powerfully the loneliness of that feeling and we shot it in something like in something like twenty-one days in London very quick very small but it's amazing you get bonded by those experiences I saw Rachel recently and had seen it for a long time and I feel like I've know her for the rest of my life just by the intensity of that experience speaking of the intensity of the experience you have prepared for I saw the light it was about four years ago was about the time that this project started first gestating right what appeals to you about Hank Williams because this performance in this film is so spectacular and it and it hits all these levels and all this nuance about a man's life who a lot of us know the music you may not know the story behind all that what appealed to you about Hank Williams honestly um when I first heard the script it the the foreignness of it was part of the thrill and I was born in London in 1981 and Hank Williams was born in Mount Olive Alabama in 1923 and he was a huge star and and changed the face of American music and and part of the excitement of it was the foreign territory and as I spoke with a director Mark Abraham lighting change Budi start sliding into darkness he will be here for a few more hours she's changing the vibe yes I had a Skype conversation with Mark Abraham and he was most interested in taking the icon off the pedestal in getting behind the myth to play the man and Danny Dale who was an old bandmate of of Hanks and the drifting Cowboys used to say legends don't know their legends when they're being made they just folks and I loved that and I wanted to I thought I saw the light as a screenplay was two films really it was portrait of the artist as a young man and and a portrait of a marriage and and Mark's conjecture is that the power of those songs and they they're the enduring legacy that they transmit is connected to the turbulence of his relationships with women and he was you know he was so young he was 24 25 when he had his first hit and he was 29 when he died and he did so much in such a short space of time and he was from the south he lived a hard life he was poor he had nobody around him to anchor him he was rebellious he was he didn't take any [ __ ] and and he wrote about things that happened to him in his life about falling in love about falling out of love about being in the doghouse and and people connected to that authenticity in that sincerity in a very profound way and he changed music that's what I found so amazing is you know I remember listening to honky tonk women by the Rolling Stones when I was 15 I had no idea what a honky-tonk was I just thought it sounded cool and and and and you know Mick Jagger and those guys were were listening to Hank and listening to honky-tonk blues and so was Bob Dylan and so was Johnny Cash so it's Bruce Springsteen they all start with Hank whenever they whenever they talk about their influences they go well all starts with Hank Williamson and so that the idea that I might be able to to try and represent that was about a knife the thing I found fascinating about Hank I should say is the tension between his external charisma and his internal vulnerability he was clearly electrifying on stage I mean that's what people say that this presence he was like Elvis before Elvis um but he was tortured he was a tortured soul and he was an addict he was an alcoholic he was on prescription grow drugs he was afflicted with spina bifida and this tension I found that's what excites me about acting really is it and some people have noticed it that I I would maybe with all my characters I try to get underneath the the skin or behind the carapace because I think as human beings we construct an identity which we present to the world and we all put our best foot forward because that's who we are but some but so often behind that is a much more turbulent much more chaotic vulnerability which we hide we hide it with charm and with status and with a sense of style and with detachment but we're also vulnerable and and I think if acting has any power it's to show that vulnerability and that's what connects people and not necessarily and what I've done but I know that's what moves me and the actors I admire is that they they are able to show something very Universal and fragile about the human spirit behind a character be they soldiers be their rockstars be their demigods is that we're all bound by our fertility and you even had to additionally learn how to sing I mean at they didn't couldn't sing earlier but it's I couldn't saying I couldn't say ah ha ha that's for the half big because you learn how to sing the end yodel in a Hank Williams style of yodeling and that was an immersive process in and of itself right yeah becomes a time in a man's life when he is called upon to yodel for some that happens later than others for me happen when I was 33 years old yeah it was him it was for me it was essential I couldn't see some people have asked me why didn't i lip-sync along with Hank and for me there would have been a break in my authenticity and my interpretation [ __ ] Spacek sang as Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter Joaquin Phoenix sang as Johnny Cash and bought the line if I was going to dress up and look like Hank and and speakers Hank and interpret his truth step into his shoes I had to sing and I the first the bet the best thing I did was just to get out of my comfort zone in a real way and I moved to Nashville for five weeks before I started shooting I lived with this man called Rodney Crowell our executive music producer terrific patient and respected musician in his own right who'd seen Hank on his father's shoulders at the age of 2 it was his first memory and he went to behind boot camp and we sang and played every day and it was terrifying and difficult and joyful and like anything you have to dyspraxia practice and I'd always said to him if I were playing an Olympic sprinter I would need a coach to tell me how many miles a day to run and how fast and in that respect I needed him to tell me how many miles how many hours a day to sing and in what way and we sang the blues and we sang Howlin wolf and Jimmy Reed we sang John Lennon we'd sit there we talked about performance we talked about the Freddie Mercury and Elvis and James Brown these people who had this presence you know what was this thing that unites cat you know what is charisma on stage Merle Kilgore who was one of the drifting Cowboys said when Hank yodeled especially in his first hit in lovesick blues he said dad's when they stood up and started throwing the babies in the air it was a clearly this this this extraordinary kind of sexual connection he had with his audience it was you know it was that Elvis moment so yeah yodeling was pretty pretty scary but I managed to pull it off a side note about Hank that I feel I feel it in your performance which is that he was one of the if not the first musician of cádiz catastrophic effect on his own life who died of his own hand people forget about George Gershwin died of a disease Benny Goodman dies in a plane crash but Hank Williams when he dies it dies because of his alcoholism he's really the first one I feel like we feel that in your performance that sense of almost inevitability yeah right so to me it's so sad because there's an interesting debate to be had as great art at what cost especially in music and you think of the number of extraordinary musicians who have given us something very intense and then have left the building and and and and have left us too soon they're stars that burned twice as bright and not for long Jim Morrison Amy Winehouse Janis Joplin Jimi Hendrix so there are the that you know there are actors as Heath Ledger's Marilyn Monroe James Dean and and Hank was really the first of his kind who who seemed to create at such a velocity and such a pitch of intensity that this this the amount of material and and that came out of him during 1947 and 1953 which then went on to change music and then he just he left us too soon and there's a question as you know as to whether is that are those self destructive in its thinks part of the generation of the art are they necessary in some awful tragic way or is it is it just that they're somehow they are corollary to the to the art you know is that what is the reversion of Hanks life if somebody got him to help him at a particular time might he have creatives new work in his seniority that we now don't have but I did find it fascinating that he just he was unstoppable he was on he was he was his presence was so full in his songs and in his life and that's what he's sang about and I think you know the darker the circumstances of his life the more powerful those lyrics to write a song like cold cold hard is it someone who's deeply lonely and which is so sad because he was so successful and so famous and there's an interesting question about the isolation of Fame especially at that time and what and what in the corrosive aspects of it if you're not if you don't have the armor to protect yourself just by the way that speaking about the accent your accent as Hank is spot-on you just dipped into another one a couple of minutes ago the couple of nights ago I heard you do Anthony Hopkins you have a great talent for imitation and for you have a great ear for for accents is that something you've always had I don't know I something I've always done I've always I remember I had a double tape deck recorder when I was about nine and I used to do my own radio show for an audience of one and I would at the top middle to show and I would do all the voices I would do the news in the weather and I was so fascinated I just I loved I loved doing voices I always have actually I've always done impressions and it comes from love that comes out of you know and it's something that's I guess that musical it is an aspect I suppose a musical ear and well the Anthony Hopkins thing is is it's faster I mean you saw that clip in up domine I may I may have told the story before but it was an amazing moment that's worth recounting and I felt Chris Hemsworth a knife that's so lucky to be in Thor we were you know picked out of obscurity son and suddenly standing next to him and and Rene Russo and Natalie Portman and colum Theo and idris elba and we we follow we'd won the lottery and Tony as he insists on being called invited me to just have breakfast with him before shooting ended and and he said this extraordinary thing he said said I see what you're doing I see what you're doing it's interesting I've been there before myself I see it and he said you know my whole life I've been I've played I played lots of different parts I played kings and princes and warriors and Butler's and poets and and people stopping the street they asked me about one man who do you think that man is I knew who that man was and you know who that man is and and he said it's so fascinating to me because because people want their lives to be full of love and and and laughter and friendship and and happiness and they want to have good lives at one time nice lights want to be happy but what they really want is they want to go into a dark room on a Friday night with their friends and family oh that loved one they want to sit in the darkness and they want to look at artists who are brave enough to stare into that darkness and they don't have to take it home and I was so I thought it was such an extraordinary summation of a certain kind of work in music and film and at the time the Dark Knight and Heath Ledger's performance was it was very current the time he shot that film and I remember thinking you know that they the intensity of admiration towards that film in towards his performance is is we all loved watching it but there's no way you'd want to meet that person you wouldn't want that person anywhere near your life and yet we need actors and musicians and writers and and painters who are courageous enough to go there and Hank was one of those guys who almost who go to that dark place on our behalf and and send dispatches back and I found that very moving honest I think that's absolutely true of Sir Anthony Hopkins I think he's done that many many times so I just anyway that's my Anthony Hopkins story it's a great story and a great accent that goes along with it um speaking about tonal changes the the effect of hi-rise I think it feels very much like it's a tone that Stanley Kubrick would like it's a satirical absurdist tones from a JG Ballard novel from the 70s on people really have to see it to appreciate it I won't even do it justice by describing it but in getting into the absurdity of the situations in SIA saw it in Toronto to a rapturous response what was it like kind of getting into that world of that sort of absurdist satirical but hyper odd and realistic tone I again it felt like new territory I loved I loved been Wheatley's films I don't know how many people here have seen been Wheatley's films and if they are the dark and I bet that British - and I remember I saw a field in England I was in and I was in America I think you know and I and I watched it when it was released it was released across all platforms at the same time and I watched it on my laptop and it made me homesick I really there's something very sort of British about been his sense of humor his inheritance of British culture and I think I was very important to me to champion British film and I've the script came to me and it's an adaptation of the ballad novel and in Ballad there is there is provocation laced into that novel he knew exactly what he was doing he that the novel opens with the line later as Lang sat on the balcony eating the dog he reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months and and he takes the English middle-class essentially or the upper-middle class throws them into a building which is is a sort of replacement for nature which will provide for all their needs locks the doors and keeps them there and watches the the veneer of civilized British manors fall away to reveal something much more on on unpleasant and it's a satire on on social mores it's a investigation of class struggle it's an investigation of inequality and and Britishness really and I think Ballard always felt outside British culture in lots of ways is it you know someone who grew up as a British citizen in Shanghai but had never seen British soil until he was a teenager he arrived and didn't understand he arrived in the 50s after the war and didn't recognize the place he'd been brought up to believe in and he couldn't believe this these little disputes that that the heat that people had about territory and and manners and and so high rises a very provocative satire on that and I enjoyed kind of and I think we all did actually because it's a film about indulgence and these are other sophisticated characters I play a physiologist who's trying to live in an anonymous life in his 1000th share of the cliff face but the building is populated by very genteel professions by dentists and Gynaecologists broadcasters people in PR architects documentary makers they will have very respectable jobs and slowly as the as the electricity goes off and the lift stopped working and the water is turned off you some darker more feral truth about these people is revealed and Ballard is really is really provoking the audience and I think and been honored that provocation in his film and it is a mad chaotic dissent in a way that that is a much more familiar if people are familiar with the films of of Kubrick perhaps or Lindsay Anderson or Ken Russell or Nicolas Roeg it's it's those a there's a big heroes for been and and they became part of the fabric of high-rise you've said you love diving sort of into other people's lives examining the other characters that are going on I would love to talk about the night manager and talk about Jonathan pine that particular character obviously a man who has sort of left a clandestine life behind to be an anonymous hotel manager and then is drawn back into it what would appeal to you about Jonathan pine and the night manager well first of all the night manager is a novel by John Licari and Licari is I think the one of the greatest English novelists of the last century I think he is a master at his chosen form which is the espionage thriller and I also think he's one of the great analysts of the British psyche and the the contradictions therein and and that's what the novel is about as much as anything story-wise Jonathan pine is a former British officer in the Army or soldier rather and who served in our adaptation in the Iraq war of 2003 and you meet him in 2011 as the night manager of a five-star hotel in Cairo in the middle of the Arab Spring riots the popular uprising that fell Hosny Mubarak and in the wake of a particular incident he is recruited by the SIS The Secret Intelligence Service mi6 to become a field agent and take down an international arms dealer who is selling standard and chemical weapons to the highest bidder in the Middle East with no moral qualms about the victims of the violence from which he profits and the astonishing thing about the night manager is is first of all it was an incredible character a character which which he's described in the novel as a collector of other people's languages a perpetual escapee from emotional entanglement a self exiled creature of the night and a sailor without a destination and and and that death is given a destination by his moral commitment and you can feel david korn well which is the real image on the carry you can feel the support of the author behind the moral courage of pine and burr in this case played by Olivia Colman and his his righteous rage about against Hugh Laurie's character Hugh Laurie plays a critical Richard Roeper who is who has all of Hugh's attributes he is charming and affable and sophisticated and urbane and he want to be in his company you want he want to get to know him because you're drawn to him he's attractive he's seductive he's witty and and that sophistication is very appealing and the way the brilliant way that Hugh plays it is is that you see why everybody loves Roper but then you see but underneath that is somebody who is a psychotic and a cynic Hubal who believes deeply in in the rottenness of the world and that someone has to capitalize on that rottenness for the greatest financial gain so he trades in chemical weapons he trades in death and he laughs about it and and somehow Licari Zanger is very very is very intense I remember talking to him about it and that's why I think in that scene that's the scene with Olivia is it that line of pines is lifted straight from the novel when Burr asks pine why did he do it why are you here talking to me and pine says if there is a man selling a private Arsenal to an Egyptian crook in the middle of the Arab Spring and he's English and you're English you do it some some calling that that Licari is fury that the inheritor of all the freedoms of British society is using those freedoms and privileges to do the worst things imaginable to turn our world into a darker place and I found that more in them and the morality in it apart from the the thrill of playing the cat-and-mouse game that he is so expert at constructing moving and and romantic as that he's at you know the Carrey's novels are full of flawed heroes who are haunted by doubt haunted by moral ambivalence about the DMV the hypocrisy of having to do very bad things for the greater good but there's a deep romance in in their solitude and that's for you note from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or the spy who came in from the cold or the constant gardener these are people who were driven by a desire to to fight the system and it was it was just a wonderful thing to be part of so I can go on I'm I will three more question I will wrap up how long how long Luke do you want us to go on for okay we could be here if I honestly could I have nowhere to be so I can go on and I'm enjoying it so I will use this I will some of you guys are all still up for it I just want to comment that the night manager has been a phenomenon in the UK it starts in the United States April 19th it is your first spy I would this is really just a shameless opportunity to ask you about James Bond and if of course given the chance to be James Bond what would you bring to Mr Bond that we haven't seen before I had to be asked I couldn't possibly comment I think it would be ungracious to to talk I'm and I haven't been asked so I I don't I wouldn't I don't want to talk about I mean I wouldn't want to comment on it and with that if I ever were the case it's been called the greatest pub game in in the UK right as people say at the vine thank you very much yeah I'll leave it there but just then I will play off of the idea of the preparation for I saw the light and how much you know the other night we were talking about that you and one of your co-stars in I saw the light wrench MIT we're talking about the work of a philosopher Alain de Botton in talking about there the relationship between Hank and her character and obviously you're bringing up so many things in in preparation for a role are there any roles that you've had the least amount of preparation for but it actually benefited you what have you had the least prep time for but you were actually able to jump in and have it work out for the best I think f scott Fitzgerald at midnight in Paris I was cast very shortly before I was due to shoot and Woody Allen in his unique inevitable way didn't want me to read the whole script he only sent the whole script Owen Wilson every other actor in that film received little piecemeal stuff and so and I had to work out was very cryptic I've got these pages and the characters names in the scenes were Scott and Zelda and Ernest and Gill and I thought it does not in fact a coincidence or is that Fitzgerald and so it wasn't a comedic made explicit and I wasn't quite sure if I was being asked to play V F scott Fitzgerald and I couldn't get woody on the phone so I just sort of winged it because I was in Paris about a week later and so I did as much homework as I could on on his speaking voice and and and I went back and and read some short stories and read some of Hemingway's accounts of Fitzgerald but honestly the and he shoots a short day because he wants to play the saxophone and the clarinet I mean oh and have dinner and and and so I so really remember Corey Stoll with both Hemingway I said whether I write he said he basically got to take Senor out and so yeah I remember just not really being prepared I felt to play Fitzgerald but it all turned out okay in the end it sure did it's a terrific performance I'm gonna wrap up with this question which is that David far who did the adaptation of the night manager so that one of the things he loves about your portrayal of Jonathan pine is that as an actor you really listen and you turn silence into a virtue is that one of the keys for you for acting is really listening and sort of being there and big present yeah and it's so interesting a lot of people talk about acting as being in the moment being present and having the discipline to to stay present and I actually sometimes think that it's not quite that it's actually about because sometimes if you're in the present moment you at the present moment is it's Friday night the sun's going down you're losing the light the crew attired and you have to take yourself out of the present moment and commit to another moment which is fueled by your imagination which I always think is interesting because because sometimes it is it's about having the discipline to not be in the present moment and then once you've isolated the scene that you're in to really be there with your scene partner and I do think the best the best acting I've ever done has been in response to another actor it's been about the rally that we play together across the net and that's when it that's when acting is the most exciting when you all do our very solitary homework in our research and finally you get on the you get on set you get on the ice you get on the court and you play and and that's you know the stuff that you very generously showed before this is you know if there's anything interesting and what I'm doing it's because I'm I'm an acting opposite Anthony Hopkins or Olivia Colman or was at a scene I was in the bathroom as it seen from her eyes with Siena and Luke Edmunds Elisabeth Moss right and it was great in that film and Elizabeth Olsen in in I saw the light and the fascinating thing about pine was I think there is something very active in the way that he is passive and the whole portrayal felt like a kind of a distillation of all my thoughts about acting and identity is is actually Jonathan pine himself is an immaculate performer he's somebody who is able to hide behind different masks he's able to read to read the signs and the atmosphere and adapt himself to any given situation but always watchful always listening and I and the fascinating thing about the performance was I was trying to communicate how active his passivity is that there are more energetic people in the room whether it's Roper or Corki has brilliantly played by tom hollander or jed or anybody else that the pine is receding into the shadows but I needed the audience to see that I was still listening that I was still watching that in a way I'm I'm the avatar for them for the audience in those things but yes in some acting is the best acting is reacting and listening and that's the hardest thing to do we've been so lucky to have you present with your to us tonight ladies and gentlemen I'm Hiddleston it's a great thing to have rehearsals and just know that you're you're coming at it from the same point of view it just means you can be more free you can play and enjoy it and I think that's what elevates good work - great work or really exciting or daring work I've been really lucky um and yet still it does feel like it's really hard it's what we are in a trade in which so many people in the world want to do it it's something that we everyone who does it is passionate about you

Channel: BAFTA Guru

Views: 386,745

Keywords: tom hiddleston, tom hiddleston interview, Thor, loki, Tom Hiddleston On The Best Advice He Got - You Can Do This If You Want To, Tom Hiddleston Impressions, The Night Manager, High Rise, Hank Williams, BAFTA, BAFTA Guru, BAFTA New York, In Conversation, kong, skull island, avengers, marvel cast, thor ragnorak

Id: yPFvnxNubeM

Length: 60min 23sec (3623 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2016