PEOPLE Hiddleston
PEOPLE Hiddleston carries his privilege lightly but with confidence. He comes across as a total gentleman in person – polite, refined, funny and self-deprecating soon, he’s speaking the words himself, walking and talking to camera. His cut-glass diction, tinged with a hint of threat, is a joy to listen to. “Do I prefer playing villains?” He laughs at the idea when we meet on the set of a new, third film he’s making for Jaguar to mark the launch of the XE. “I’ve had a good time playing more compassionate and sympathetic characters, so I hope I haven’t been boxed in by that. But I grew up loving villains in films myself, so being allowed to play such a bad guy as Loki who exists on this grand scale is great.” Of course, the real Hiddleston couldn’t be less villainous, or more of a gentleman. He was raised in London and Oxford and spent some of his school years as a boarder at Eton College, where he was a contemporary of Prince William. He’s smart too: he studied classics at Cambridge, gaining a ‘double first’ class degree, and followed that with two years at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London (better known as RADA). Hiddleston carries his education and privilege lightly but with confidence, and he comes across as a total gentleman in person – polite, refined, funny and self-deprecating. No wonder the worlds of film and theatre have fallen head over heels for him. It was a memorable role in a small British indie film by a completely unknown director, Joanna Hogg, that first brought Hiddleston to the attention of the wider film industry. In 2007’s Unrelated, he plays Oakley, a well-to-do 19-year-old on holiday in Tuscany with his divorced father. His character is seemingly full of bravado but remains a hurt little boy inside, still finding his way in the world. It marked Hiddleston out as an intriguing talent: outwardly polished but with hidden emotional depths. Hiddleston remembers the role coming out of nowhere: “It was so strange. I was two weeks out of RADA. When you leave, there’s a strange period when you’re trying to work out how to handle auditions. There was a heatwave and I was watching an Italian film at a cinema in Soho in London and I got a text from my agent which read, ‘Call me right now! Where are you?’ He told me: ‘You’ve got to be at BAFTA [The British Academy of Film and Television Arts] in 20 minutes.’ I was wearing flip-flops, shorts and a T-shirt, and said I couldn’t go in this gear. He said, ‘Just apologise for looking scruffy.’ Little did I know I’d dressed in character.” Hogg was the first of many directors to fall for Hiddleston. 44 j THE BLOCKBUSTER ISSUE
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