The “masterful” performance that defined Tom Hiddleston’s career: “The best example”
Few actors have been as tied to one character over the past decade or so than Tom Hiddleston, who, ever since first appearing as Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, has been inexplicably linked to the Norse trickster god, having played the role in seven different movies, two seasons of his own TV show, and, crucially, a couple of Simpsons shorts for Disney Plus; it doesn’t get much better than that.
Speaking to Backstage in 2024, the star of The Night Manager cast his mind all the way to the very early days of the character, where he first played Loki in Thor, the third overall instalment in the burgeoning MCU. Hiddleston had an advantage over his fellow auditionees because he’d worked with director Kenneth Branagh before, who helmed Thor (yes, that is weird), but still needed to be careful when it came to bringing this iconic comic book character to the big screen for the very first time.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is almost Shakespearean, this language’,” he recalled, “What’s the best example I can [look to] of an actor who managed to humanise and make real this elevated world of myth?”
As well as the figure of Loki in both Norse and Marvel mythology, Hiddleston drew on a number of other sources, studying the great British actor Peter O’Toole, particularly his performance in The Lion in Winter. However, when it came to grounding a superhuman character in reality, there was one performance he looked to more than anything else, and that’s Christopher Reeve as the titular hero in the 1978 version of Superman.
“He’s masterful in that film,” Hiddleston mused, “In a way, it’s a similar premise: He’s a god or he’s a being from a different realm, and it’s not naturalistic in the way that we might expect. He does it so truthfully, and it’s so clear and clean and open and honest. I thought, ‘If I can even approximate or get close to the kind of clarity that Christopher Reeve had in those films, I’ll be lucky’.”
Hiddleston might be tied to Loki, but the late, great Reeve was bound to the role of Superman with chains of steel, such that he laid the groundwork so firmly that every actor who has played a live-action Superman since has resembled him in some form or fashion.
Without his boyish good looks and undeniable goofy charm, neither the original film franchise nor the entire genre of superhero movies would have been a success, and even after his death in 2004, he continues to cast a shadow over the franchise, with his son Will being given a role in James Gunn’s 2025 reboot of the ‘Man of Steel’ as a nod to his father’s legacy.
Whatever Hiddleston took from studying Reeve and his command over the role of Superman, it paid off as both men are now permanently associated with their respective alter egos, for better or for worse, and both were instrumental in the success of their opposing brands.
As was the case with Brandon Routh, I feel very sorry for whichever poor sap has to replace Hiddleston when he finally decides to hang up his sceptre.
