The tragedy of Tom Hiddleston: how Marvel ruined a great actor
The second series of Loki has just concluded, and for many, it will have confused as much as it has enlightened. As with many of Marvel’s other shows and films, the emphasis on world-building has led to nigh-on incomprehensible relationships between the characters, as well as the more sober and sombre tone taking a lot of the wacky fun out of the scenarios depicted. If you fully understand whether Jonathan Majors’ character is Victor Timely, Kang the Conqueror or He Who Remains – or all three, simultaneously – then you’re doing better than the vast majority of viewers.
Yet one aspect has remained consistent throughout, and that is the hugely enjoyable performance by the show’s star, Tom Hiddleston. The actor has been playing Loki now for a dozen years, since his first appearance in Kenneth Branagh’s first Thor picture in 2011. He continues to attract acclaim for his charismatic and charming performance as the time-hopping anti-hero, even if those who have followed the character’s long evolution from tormented but dastardly villain bent on global domination to a likeable, if still morally flawed, protagonist might now be forgiven for feeling confused at the sheer number of iterations of the trickster god that there have now been.
And – spoiler alert! – with the finale’s revelation that Loki has now become the new keeper of time, looking after the infinite number of timelines that the multiverse demands, the show simultaneously gives its anti-hero a satisfactory resolution while, as ever, keeping the door open to future appearances.
Not that we need to see any more of the trickster god. At the last count, Hiddleston has appeared in films seven times as Loki – including uncredited surprise cameos – in addition to the two seasons of the eponymous show, and the animated series and shorts that he has contributed his voice to. It is difficult to think of any other actor who has become so synonymous with a single role in recent times. Whereas most of Hiddleston’s Avengers co-stars alternated their iconic superhero characters with other work – few would think of, say, Mark Ruffalo solely for his performance as the Hulk – he has become defined by his willingness to keep on reprising the role of Loki.
We cannot know whether he does so as part of an ongoing contractual obligation that he signed up to, possibly in blood, when he was a little-known British stage actor over a decade ago, or simply because he really enjoys playing the character, but he must thrive on his regular appearances at such events as Comic-Con, where he is assured of a deafening reception that even the most beloved of rock stars would struggle to equal.
It helps, of course, that Hiddleston is superb as Loki. He was cast in the role by his mentor Branagh, who he had worked with on stage and in Wallander on television, after an unsuccessful audition for the part of Thor, and in retrospect this was the right decision. Just as Chris Hemsworth is the heroic hammer-wielder, so it was clear from the first time that Hiddleston appeared on screen that he had entirely nailed the character, bringing Shakespearean gravitas and an affecting sense of wounded dignity to what could have been a standard-issue baddie with a lesser actor.
He then managed the impressive feat of stealing the show as the main antagonist in The Avengers, spitting off Joss Whedon-scripted one-liners with aplomb, and yet never becoming wholly unsympathetic despite the nefariousness of his actions. And although his subsequent appearances have varied according to the talents of the filmmakers he is working with – his appearance in Thor: Ragnarok was magisterial and hilarious, his brief cameos in the later Avengers pictures less impressive – he remains a compulsively watchable and scene-stealing presence.
There is, inevitably, a downside to all this. When Hiddleston began his career around two decades ago, he swiftly established himself as one of the most exciting young British actors of his generation. Like his friend and occasional co-star Benedict Cumberbatch, he could play charismatic leading roles, but he could also disappear into character parts with ease.
After the inevitable apprenticeship on television – in which he appeared in everything from Casualty to the Winston Churchill drama The Gathering Storm as Churchill’s son Randolph – he made his first film appearances for Joanna Hogg, in the low-budget but critically acclaimed pictures Unrelated and Archipelago, at the same time that his leading role in Wallander as the clear-sighted detective Magnus Martinsson led both to his being introduced to a far wider audience than before. This led to a working relationship with his mentor Branagh, who then encouraged him to audition for Thor. The rest, as they say, is history.
The disadvantage of Hiddleston becoming indentured to the Marvel series is that there has been a steady decline in the quality and the interest of the work that he has taken on outside of the MCU. In 2011 – a year that he must surely look back on as an annus mirabilis – he not only appeared in Thor, but worked with Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen and Terence Davies, giving memorable performances in roles as eclectic as the decent, doomed Captain Nicholls in War Horse, a louche F Scott Fitzgerald in Midnight in Paris and the petulant RAF officer Freddie Page in The Deep Blue Sea.
He was regularly cited as the most exciting British actor of his generation, attracting a rare mixture of admiration for his intellectual qualities – a Cambridge graduate, he took a double first in Classics – and for his classic good looks. It helped that he was an obviously friendly and decent man, who was charming both to interviewers and to starstruck admirers. The world lay before him, it appeared: an exciting, if dangerous, position for a young actor to be in.
At first, it seemed as if he could juggle the demands of Marvel stardom with other, more demanding roles. He was an excellent Prince Hal, and then Henry V, in the Sam Mendes-produced Hollow Crown series of Shakespearean adaptations, just as he made for a dynamic and charismatic Coriolanus on stage at the Donmar Warehouse in 2013. He continued to work with interesting, unusual filmmakers – he popped up in Jim Jarmusch’s vampire drama Only Lovers Left Alive and Guillermo del Toro’s stately horror Crimson Peak – as well as showing a sense of fun with a cameo in Muppets Most Wanted as none other than the Great Escapo.
By the time that he appeared in the lead of the John le Carré adaptation The Night Manager in early 2016, he was a household name, and that rare actor who could appeal to essentially everyone, from lovers of arthouse drama and Shakespeare to comic-book and horror aficionados. A brief nude flash in The Night Manager, in which he exposed his buttocks during a love scene with Elizabeth Debicki, sent the internet into a frenzy of approbation. He became a frontrunner to play James Bond, and seemed to have the world at his feet. What could possibly go wrong?
The answer, bizarrely, was Taylor Swift, who he met at the celebrated Black and White ball at the Met shortly after The Night Manager first aired. The American singer’s romantic life has been pored over since her first ascent to stardom, and Hiddleston was the latest in a long line of high-profile flings who included the likes of Harry Styles and Jake Gyllenhaal. Swift has form in immortalising her former lovers in song – her hit We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together is said to be about Gyllenhaal – and so the risk of entering into a relationship with her was not only the chance of a scathing break-up song being written about him, but also the possibility, for the first time in his professional life, that the attention directed towards Hiddleston would be unfavourable.
So it swiftly proved, when he was widely ridiculed for wearing a ‘I ?? TS’ T-shirt on 4 July. It was rumoured that the relationship was nothing more than a publicity stunt, and that the suspiciously staged-looking photos of the two kissing in Rhode Island or walking hand-in-hand on the beach had been designed to attract media attention. And, as Hiddleston was by far the less famous of the duo, he would, inevitably, be the beneficiary of such scrutiny.
Whether or not it was wholly real, the fling came to an end after a few months, and Hiddleston found himself being briefed against to the media by “friends” of Swift. It was said, cuttingly, that “it was all far too public…Tom freaked her out with his love of the limelight.” Hiddleston, every inch the gentleman, has never said anything remotely disobliging about Swift subsequently. Yet it was still an embarrassing development that showed Tom Hiddleston, actor, what the perils of being Tom Hiddleston, celebrity, were.
His career since has taken a safety-first direction. He was a faintly unlikely action hero in Kong: Skull Island, where critics agreed that he was overshadowed by both the giant ape and the more colourful supporting performances of John C. Reilly and Samuel L Jackson. The only other roles of any distinction that he has taken are the male lead in Apple’s little-seen gothic drama The Essex Serpent, opposite Claire Danes, and a return to the stage in 2019 in Betrayal, where he met his current partner Zawe Ashton.
Those of us who expected that he would one day make a magnificent Hamlet were disappointed to find that, when he took the role on under Branagh’s direction in 2017, it was a semi-private performance in a tiny theatre designed to raise funds for his alma mater RADA. This newspaper described his performance as “proactive, masculine, edgy to the point of aggression – and definitely, absolutely sane.” Yet only a few thousand people were lucky enough to see it.
Still, if Hiddleston’s choices have often been low-key, there has always been Loki to keep him in the public eye. Yet, surely, the end of the character’s arc, as depicted in the second season of the eponymous show, is the time for this great actor to wish to step away from the golden handcuffs of Marvel and embrace more interesting and challenging roles. Cumberbatch, for instance, has paid off his mortgage(s) while playing Dr Strange, but has also given indelible performances in everything from The Power of the Dog to Patrick Melrose on television, showing a range and depth that his superhero performances barely hint at.
Hiddleston, on the evidence of his career to date, is no less talented than Cumberbatch, but he is sorely in need of greater variety if he does not want to be pigeonholed by a single role. Otherwise, despite the wealth and fame that it has brought him, he might think wryly on what the obituaries will one – hopefully distant – day say about him: “Tom Hiddleston, actor best known for Loki in the Marvel series…”
We can only hope that this fine actor embraces more dynamic choices in his career in due course – one of which may yet be upon us, with his lead in Mike Flanagan’s forthcoming Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck – as otherwise he may yet go down as one of the industry’s great “what might have beens”. And as his legion of fans, the Hiddlestoners, will readily attest, he deserves considerably more than that.
