The 2007 role that almost doomed Tom Hiddleston: “I’ve always tried to resist it”
Being typecast isn’t necessarily a terrible thing for actors who have a very limited range, but it can be frustrating for those who want to expand to showcase their abilities, and Tom Hiddleston has had to fight hard to avoid this fate.
Playing similar characters in nearly every project can suggest comfort with the status quo, even if most actors want to be disruptive in one way or another, but why actors are often typecast in the first place is that they’ve proven to be talented at something, and in the eyes of casting directors and Hollywood agents, there is no reason to mess with a formula if it is working.
Hiddleston faced this struggle early on in his career when he worked with filmmaker Joanna Hogg on the British drama Unrelated, where his performance was acclaimed, but he revealed that his director had warned him about the ways that he might be perceived as a result.
“Joanna warned me about this when we first made Unrelated,” Hiddleston recalled, “She said, ‘It’s going to be very easy to put you in period stuff’, and obviously she’s right. When a casting director sees a Cambridge graduate who’s tall, well-spoken, classics degree, they think, ‘Put him in a waistcoat and send him out.'”
Hiddleston has delivered terrific performances in several period pieces, including Hogg’s The Deep Blue Sea and the Woody Allen dramedy Midnight in Paris, but he said that this classical form of acting wasn’t what had interested him in the craft when he chose it as a career.
“That wasn’t the reason I became an actor, to fill that niche,” Hiddleston said, “It was because of much more muscular things: In the Name of the Father, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The French Connection. It was because of Brando and De Niro. So I’ve always tried to resist it. I never wanted to be the go-to guy for tails and waistcoats.”
Ironically, Hiddleston’s most famous role to date was a bit of a combination of these two spheres of acting, where the first Thor film was set in a mythological realm that was inspired by Norse mythology, and thus had a very Shakespearean, epic quality. However, it was once the Thor franchise began tying back into the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe that Hiddleston was able to do more with the character of Loki in the contemporary world.
The MCU had been criticised for not having villains that were as compelling as its heroes, but Hiddleston’s performance as Loki was the exception, who managed to make him a fascinating character perpetrating genuine menace, but someone who proved to be surprisingly sympathetic over time. Although the chemistry between Hiddleston and Chris Hemsworth was certainly a major reason why the characters worked so well, Thor wasn’t necessary to making Loki interesting; Hiddleston showed what he could do as a solo actor on the Disney+ series Loki, which is among the few Marvel streaming shows to be met with universally positive reviews.
The MCU might be what Hiddleston is best known for, but he hasn’t been shackled by it, for between playing a country music star in I Saw The Light, joining the Stephen King universe in The Life of Chuck, and playing a classical spy in The Night Manager, he has managed his original desire to avoid being typecast.
