I just really like cute boys and naps

Tom Hiddleston for Polo Ralph Lauren

Ship: Darcy Lewis/Loki |  For: Anon |  Prompt: “Can you come pick me up?” |  Rating: T |  Word Count: 231 | 

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A/n: No Powers AU, Loki is a professor (not Darcy’s, but it’s one of the only professions I can see him excelling at in a no-powers au), and Darcy works somewhere else (I haven’t quite figured that out just yet), but there is an age difference that led to a break up somewhere in their past.  Not an illegal one, just enough of one to render them too different to make it work.

“Can you come pick me up?” She sniffed after. It sounded wet and made his hackles rise. Not because he felt she was lying, but because of what that particular sound along with her meek request meant.

She was crying. And she needed him. Something horrible had happened and he didn’t even know what it was.

Loki knew he couldn’t ask her over the phone. He also couldn’t ask her why, when she had everyone else’s phones to dial, she had called him. He couldn’t ask what was wrong, because if he knew, he might not be able to see straight to maneuver the car to wherever she was.

His biggest fear was that she would be hurt and he wouldn’t be there to help. It was part of the reason she’d broken up with him. She’d accused him of trying to be her dad and not her daddy.

Which in and of itself should have sent him running for the hills, but here he was. Grading papers by the single light from his desk, a deadline to get those exam scores back by tomorrow. And yet, he was also answering his phone on the first ring, jumping at the chance to talk to her, even though she’d told him she needed space.

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I am in a plush international hotel — appropriately since my assignment is to discuss a television series whose hero, an MI6 agent, once managed a plush international hotel. “As a hotelier Jonathan was complete,” John le Carré wrote of his protagonist in the 1993 novel from which the BBC’s celebrated The Night Manager was adapted. “You did not wonder who his parents were or whether he listened to music or kept a wife and children or a dog. His gaze as he watched the door was steady as a marksman’s.”

Now, in the thriller’s long-awaited sequel, Jonathan Pine is pampered at the taxpayer’s expense in high-end hotels in Central America. Guest rather than staff, Pine maintains his inscrutability, then lies as if his life depends on it, which it does.

I am here to interview The Night Manager’s manager, the driven director of the new season that arrives on Thursday, five years after le Carré’s death. She is Georgi Banks-Davies, “early forties”, a celebrated commercials-maker who directed Billie Piper’s I Hate Suzie for Sky and was the lead director of Netflix’s Greek god riff Kaos.

Camila Morrone plays Pine’s love interest, Roxana

Broadcast in February 2016, BBC1’s original Night Manager was unexpectedly successful, attracting about ten million viewers each week, excellent reviews and prizes for its star Tom Hiddleston, its director Susanne Bier, its writer David Farr and Hugh Laurie, who played Pine’s target, the loathsome arms dealer Richard Roper. In it, Pine insinuated himself into Roper’s super-rich circle, but, the nation asked, would he expose Roper’s villainy before being found out himself? BBC management seized on the show as a prime example of the corporation bringing the UK together in a multichannel, although still barely streamer, age.

The new series begins with Pine back on the night shift and still scrutinising the more dubious clientele of hotels, but this time he is based in MI6 and watching a bank of screens displaying feeds from London fleshpots. He spots a face from Roper’s circle. Soon he has plunged through the LEDs into the real world and is in furious secret pursuit of more creatures of the night, the arms trade’s merchants of death. Pine, Banks-Davies says, is like a coffee percolator, managing the anger that boils within him by pushing it down.

“But he’s also the dormant dragon-slayer. And as soon as the puff of smoke is over the hill he has to start running. Tom and I would talk about that on set. The dragon-slayer can sit sleepily on the hill, just thinking that he’s safe, that he’s slayed the dragon. At the beginning of the first episode Roper is gone. Pine’s done it! But then what? Because who are we without purpose? And for Pine that means going back in, and by going back in I don’t mean undercover or in the service. I mean going back into oneself, looking in the mirror, accepting who you are. I mean, Pine would be in therapy for ever if he were to open up that percolator.”

Smooth on the surface, raging beneath it, Pine is the antithesis of Billie Piper’s explosive Suzie, Kaos’s impetuous deities and, perhaps, the family in which Banks-Davies grew up in Leicester and London. “It was a working-class Irish family. People are really present with their emotions and I think that’s a good thing we don’t necessaryily have so much in England.” She understands Pine, the digital night watchman. “I think about me as a child just sitting very quietly, very unobserved, very much at the back but watching everybody, watching and being fascinated.”

Olivia Colman as Pine’s former boss, Angela Burr

“I think there’s the literal mechanism of the spy who is undercover and can be exposed,” she replies. “But I think there’s also a bigger one at play, in which the characters have to make peace with who they are. I’m not going to give too much away, but the three lead characters, Teddy Dos Santos, Jonathan Pine and Roxana Bolanos, all take that journey of ‘I have to understand through this who I am’.”

Hiddleston’s own journey from Eton, Cambridge and Rada to fame in the Marvel Universe as the mischievous Loki and critical respect as a Shakespearean lead was already well underway when, aged 34, he took the role of Pine. Since he was filming Kong: Skull Island when The Night Manager aired, he did not immediately appreciate its reception, he tells me.

“Months later I was invited to attend the White House correspondents’ dinner in Washington DC, where President Obama dropped the mic, and where I was introduced to then vice-president Joe Biden, who told me that they had screened The Night Manager in the White House to great excitement. That kind of thing doesn’t happen every day.”

It seems he was always going to return for a second Night Manager. “Jonathan Pine,” he says, “is a genuinely great, complex character. Still waters run deep. I admire his extraordinary courage, and what he represents. He’s one of le Carré’s ‘lonely deciders’: people who have a strong moral compass, and — at enormous personal cost, to body and soul — choose to act on it, to do the right thing. Jonathan Pine is a solitary, soulful figure, living and working in the shadows, quietly defending our freedoms, an errant knight, aflame with moral fury. I admire his resilience, self-sacrifice and capacity for endurance.

“I’m fascinated by the tension between his internal world — turbulent, traumatised, on fire — and his external persona — immaculate, contained, controlled. He dissembles to discover the secrets of others. He seduces to betray. He lies to tell the truth.”

Diego Calva and Tom Hiddleston in a scene from The Night Manager

Hiddleston points out that when we meet Pine again that is no longer even his name. “His real identity has been erased from the record. He lives a new life under a new alias: Alex Goodwin. For Pine’s own safety, his real name, his real identity, his personal history and private pain have been buried and suppressed. His trauma has been locked deep within him, like an unexploded bomb.”

Wiring the bomb is David Farr, the British playwright, novelist and theatre director who wrote the original Night Manager and now its sequel. Fans, I tell him, will want to know what took him so long.

“I think the very simple answer is that there was never an intention to make a second season when we finished the first. It was an adaptation of a le Carré book. And nobody would go beyond le Carré. That would be sacrilegious.”

John le Carre with his sons in 1964

“I call it the 4.30 in the morning, half-dream thing. It’s when a lot of writers and I think musicians have the best ideas. I don’t know why. The brain is somehow in an open space and weird stuff happens. Someone else can explain that better than me, but it was vividly clear and pretty comprehensive.”

He contacted Simon Cornwell, who co-heads the Ink Factory, the production company that turns his father’s oeuvre into film and television. Simon confirmed that no sequel was in development. Farr began his research in Colombia, meeting “interesting people right on the edge of the political situation” and, of course, staying in hotels Pine would appreciate. Writing the series, he missed le Carré’s enthusiasm, but was compensated by the absolute trust of his sons, “who carry the flame very consciously”.

Director Georgi Banks-Davies

“My job is to create a thriller plot that is so totally believable and gripping you almost don’t notice it. I always feel plots only become really apparent when they don’t work. When someone suddenly goes, ‘Well, I didn’t believe that’, you detach and therefore can’t do the thing Georgi wants you to do, which is to invest in the emotional narrative.”

For all this ambition, there are good reasons this Night Manager might not achieve the acclaim its predecessor enjoyed. Two of its most compulsive characters do not return: Tom Hollander’s Corky and Laurie’s Roper — although Laurie does have a cameo of sorts as Roper’s corpse. “Occasionally when we shot in London he would come down on his motorbike, looking extremely cool, just to tease Tom and be, like, ‘It’s all on you, kid,’” Banks-Davies says. Streaming has transformed linear television’s fortunes for the worse, making ratings of ten million newsworthy.

But there are even better reasons to think The Night Manager (for which a third series is already planned) will do the business again. The Oscar-winner Olivia Colman returns as Pine’s boss/surrogate mother, and Farr says Calva and Morrone are high-wattage and produce “a very hot sexual triangle” with Hiddleston, who is “brilliant”: “I think it’s the best thing he’s done.”

Two Januaries ago Mr Bates vs the Post Office won more than ten million viewers — and The Night Manager not only debuts on New Year’s Day, when everyone is in, but follows the first of a new series of The Traitors, whose celebrity iteration was the most-watched show of 2025. And what does Slow Horses prove if not that there is an infinite interest in spooks?

The meeting of Tom Hiddleston and John Le Carré in the autumn of 2017 could have appeared in one of the British espionage writer’s novels: a chance encounter set in the early morning grandeur of Hampstead Heath, as the nation is gripped by post-Brexit uncertainty. Plus one badly behaved cocker spaniel puppy called Bobby.

The men had met two years earlier, ahead of the making of the first season of The Night Manager, the BBC series based on Le Carré’s book of the same name in which Hiddleston plays the British intelligence agent Jonathan Pine. Back then, Hiddleston had asked if there was anything Le Carré would like him to know. And, in a moment of high drama that has since been woven into the lore of the show, he replied, “‘Well, of course, Tom, you will have guessed by now that Jonathan Pine is me and now he must be you.’”

Suit and shirt by Tom Ford. Tie, vintage from Ebay. Shoe by Christian Louboutin.

And so, at 35, Hiddleston became Pine, and in turn that season of television changed his life. He won a Golden Globe. He became aware of being really known in the world, where everyone confused him and the agent he had played. And because of that confusion, the question of whether he would play James Bond came to follow him around. Meanwhile, having had his big breakthrough moment as Loki in 2011’s Thor, the thirst of Marvel fans was steadily increasing with each release. By the time he and Le Carré crossed paths again, Hiddleston had experienced the disorientating one-two combo of intense fame and a public relationship and subsequent break up with Taylor Swift. And at a fourth of July party in 2016, a private joke between friends snowballed into the most scrutinised vest in history. So he went dark for a while, and, in November 2017, he got a puppy. Before long he was taking Bobby to Hampstead Heath to train.

It was here that he bumped into Le Carré on his morning constitutional, and over the following months and years they had long conversations about the recently-elected Donald Trump; about the intensifying situation in Ukraine; about Brexit. “He would have these extraordinary takes on what was happening in the world,” Hiddleston recalled. “He had been a spy himself and seen behind the curtain. He still really believed in the country and the best things about it. It made him sad that things were being denigrated.

One topic the pair kept returning to was a second season of The Night Manager, the prospect of Hiddleston becoming Pine again hanging in the morning mist. They didn’t manage to get it done before Le Carré died in December 2020, but 10 days after he passed away, his sons Simon and Stephen Cornwell came to Hiddleston with the version of the second season that their father had wanted. The idea had come from a dream which David Farr, the writer of the first season, had after Le Carré became unwell following a fall: a vision of a black car driving through the hills of South America, winding towards a boy with an expectant look in his eyes.

As it has in the real world, 10 years have passed in the world of The Night Manager. In that time Pine’s identity has been buried and erased. Instead, Pine becomes Alex Goodwin, working for a surveillance branch of MI6 called the Night Owls – lonely, nocturnal work befitting a paranoid and fractured nation. “It’s been a long 10 years: Five prime ministers; three presidents, one of them twice; a pandemic; untold international conflict; fragmentation; uncertainty…” Hiddleston says. “We all know spies are out there, patrolling the boundaries of our reality. But what happens if those people have an existential question of, what are we defending? What’s the Britain that the service represents?”

This season is a portrait of many different types of Britishness, but it also returns to the backdrop of the original novel by drawing Pine out to Colombia. There he meets arms dealer Teddy Do Santos (Diego Calva) and his associate Roxana Bolaños (Camila Morrone), entering into a Le Carré-esque triangle of intrigue and deception where he is very soon in over his head.

Hiddleston made a deal with himself that he had to fulfil if he was to become Pine again: “This has to be bigger, braver, deeper, more exposing,” he says, his voice becoming bigger, braver, deeper, more exposing. “You have to risk more. You have to give more. It's going to cost more physically and emotionally, and it's going to be worth it.”

It is early December and in a café near Regent’s Park, Hiddleston arrives for lunch shaking the rain from his jacket. He has more years under his belt than when we last saw Jonathan Pine but he looks good: bright-eyed, handsome in an earthy, clean way. Still, the passing of time was a reality he experienced as a jumpscare when he saw the first episode’s recap of season one. “OK! Definitely in my mid-forties,” he laughs.

He goes in deep as soon as he arrives: my sister’s baby was born this morning – Is everyone well? Isn’t birth the “most beautiful, profound, earth-shattering, life-altering” experience there is? It’s something he experienced just the other day, he says, welcoming his second child into the world.

You might have been expecting this Tom Hiddleston: the one who is relentlessly, sincerely enthusiastic about Bukayo Saka’s inherent goodness and the beauty of Andy Murray’s workmanlike style of play. The one who can quote Nietzsche's famous line that the strength of a person's spirit can be measured by how much truth he could tolerate, almost word perfect. The Tom Hiddleston who does eerily good impressions and viral dance routines on chat show sofas, and is portrayed in interviews as having a labradorish zeal for even the simplest pleasures (see, notably: Bolognese).

But in the time since the first season of The Night Manager, Hiddleston has put the work into his off-screen self. He had a similar reckoning, he says, at 27, when he was only landing small TV parts and kept getting rejected at auditions. As a result, he felt like he wasn’t really in control of his life. “When I was a young man, I was constantly doing what I've been told to do. I got myself twisted in all kinds of knots, both personally and professionally,” he says. “Eventually I was like: Tom, get a grip. Go towards what interests you and motivates you. Get rid of people who don't make you feel good, who embarrass you or make you do things you don't want to do. Try not to be such a people pleaser and see where you end up.”

Shortly after he says this, as if to test the status of his people-pleasing rehabilitation, a diner from another table comes over pretending to ask what the carrots on our plates are in order to get his attention. “These are carrots,” he says happily.

But he knew his work wasn’t over back then, because a year or so after the wave of attention following The Night Manager, Hiddleston felt like his life was getting away from him again. He paused and took stock to work out if he really wanted to keep plugging away on the actor’s journey, and if so, why. “Suddenly you're looking at your choices in a different way and thinking: what do I want to do with my time and my energy? If you're really honest with yourself, some of those questions are quite hard,” he says, speaking with the careful pace of a highwire artist. “I think I had to confront a lot of stuff in my life, and the confrontation was really challenging and painful, but transformative.”

Part of that process was about making peace with himself and “all the mistakes and all the missteps and all of the moments where you said the wrong thing, did the wrong thing, made the wrong choice”. By becoming intimately acquainted with all the parts of his shadow self that he’d buried or just didn’t want to deal with, he realised that you can only change your life if you accept who you really are.

One challenge was keeping the opinions of strangers – good or bad, social media or tabloid headlines – at a safe distance. He avoids talking about anything in particular, but it is hard not to see a connection between this decision and his having to endure months of public analysis over his behaviour during a brief, private relationship, and even questions about whether it was real. “I'm really grateful for that scrutiny in some way because it generated inside me a real self discipline and rigour to [accept that] everyone's entitled to their opinion, but you have to be really disciplined about your own opinion of yourself,” he says. “That will keep you safe in the choppy waters.”

And part of it, he thinks, could just be getting older, having kids and welcoming the shift of perspective that brings. Hiddleston spent most of this year filming Tenzing, the story of the first person to climb Everest, Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay. The initial shoot took place in Nepal, where he trekked through the snow in minus 15 degrees, wearing 100 layers and with his fingertips cracking from the cold. When he returned to London in August he felt so grateful for his soft, gentle life. One night he vividly remembers sitting on the sofa watching the US Open on television with his partner, the actor Zawe Ashton. “I was reading the FT, and I was like, this is great. A perfect night. Dog on my lap. Everyone's here! I was feeling so happy to be together, to be the pack,” he says. “I love my ordinary life and I like the part of myself that’s really ordinary.”

This appreciation for healing and stories that offer some kind of redemption is something Hiddleston has admired since a young age. When he was a boy, he watched The Shawshank Redemption, which set off some internal fireworks. “I still find it incredibly emotional. It's so moving, the idea that you get another chance. I suppose I want that for everyone” he says. He felt it again when he was 14, at a production of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman at the National Theatre, and the way Paul Scofield as Borkman showed the soul of this great man made the teenage Hiddleston burst into tears.

He always wants to show the face behind the mask, because he believes inside all of us is a softness, and watching those stories has always made him feel less alone. This is why he loved playing Marvel supervillain Loki, whom he made sympathetic and fallible over a 15-year arc. That journey culminated at the end of the second season of his spin-off TV show with Loki being given a second chance; to choose not to be the bad guy. “In order to become someone different, whose story had a different ending, he had to make peace with the things he did,” Hiddleston says. “It gave him the power of authorship over his own story.”

When we meet Hiddleston has recently finished filming Avengers: Doomsday, picking up from the “glorious purpose” that Loki found at the end of season two. “My contribution has been contributed,” he says of the forthcoming film. And then, slightly less evasively: “It is monumental. The centre of the story is absolutely brilliant, and was so surprising when I read it. It just has never been done before.”

In his recent production of Much Ado about Nothing, Hiddleston relished the experience of removing the mask as Benedick. In Act II, Benedick overhears his friends saying that he is too proud to be loved by Beatrice and every night on stage Hiddleston would say: “I must not seem proud: happy are they that hear their detractions and can put them to mending”, putting words to Benedick’s realisation that he must make himself vulnerable in order to be loved. And every night he really could hear the audience thinking, Oh shit! Or, to put it in Hiddleston’s English: “what a perfect, crystalline jewel of an idea!”

Redemption is a little harder to come by for Jonathan Pine given the many masks he wears. For Hiddleston, the most enjoyable parts of playing him this season were when he is pulling the strings: like a tennis match that he carefully orchestrates (killer serve, Hiddleston’s own), or stunts like scaling a wall and a motorbike chase, which he diligently trained for and was desperate to take on. So much so that, while filming the latter, he slipped on the post-thunderstorm concrete of Medellín and went flying.

But the most challenging moments were letting the audience occasionally see glimpses of a broken man trying his best. Hiddleston often thinks about when Federer and Nadal used to go to five sets, and the way the camera would cut to a close-up after a double fault. That pain! That dignity! If only he could put that vulnerability into a performance. With Pine he tried to let flashes of it show. “You see it for a moment, the window to his soul is opened and then closed, and this impeccable agent is back behind the wheel.”

In returning to the world of The Night Manager, Hiddleston wanted to keep Le Carré’s voice alive in his head. To help him do so, Le Carré’s son Simon had pointed Hiddleston to a 2023 documentary called The Pigeon Tunnel by director Errol Morris, interviews for which took place a year before Le Carré died. “It really is Le Carré’s last word on himself,” Hiddleston says. “It's almost an interrogation and a confession in the same breath.”

In the documentary, Le Carré talks openly about his painful childhood where his mother walked out when he was very young, leaving him with his father who was a known conman. Throughout his childhood the rug would constantly be pulled: money came in and soon went away. People arrived then were never seen again. They would suddenly have to move house. Nothing was real.

There was one part of the documentary that Hiddleston kept coming back to – a section which he now starts reciting as a dramatic monologue in the restaurant, causing the woman at the next table to look over. Her jaw drops ever so slightly.

“Of truth we didn't speak, of conviction we didn't speak,” says Hiddleston as Le Carré. “The most important thing was the imprint of personality. You learned very quickly early on, that being off stage was boring. You polish your act, you tell funny stories. You learn,” he breaks for a moment, “and this is the line that hit me between the eyes,” he resumes character. “You learn early on, there is no centre to a human being.”

Hiddleston watched the documentary over and over again, searching for the parts of himself that Le Carré had written into Jonathan Pine. “He'd invested Pine with so much of his own complexity and this duality: that young boy who just needs things to be stable, who wants his mother to stay, who wants his father to tell the truth,” he says.

And yet Hiddleston couldn’t help but need to believe in the human heart of the man he was playing. “I think there is a centre to Pine actually, and maybe that's because I believe in his goodness,” he says. “I believe in the goodness of people and things.”

After he says it there’s a moment where I can almost see him cringe, so he backtracks to explain. He doesn’t want to sound Pollyannaish, but he has come to see that you can only appreciate the goodness in people by facing down the bad. He’s confronted the cynicism inside him and the reality that people aren’t always so great. But seeing his kids come into the world with such unvarnished goodness was evidence that we are all born that way and should try to hold onto it. And even though he has now been here for five hours despite only being obliged to stay for two, and it’s dark and rainy outside, and at home his Christmas tree has been up for four days without any decorations, and urgently needs his attention, he keeps asking questions.

And before he finally leaves he asks one more: “Do you think there’s a centre to a human being?” And I say yes because I can’t bear to say no, but also because you could not look at this man and believe that was not true.

“It has taken a long time but I know what the centre of me is,” he says. “At least, I hope so.”

Summary: There's a man in the clearing. She blinks, certain for a moment that she's seeing things - but it is a man, a shirtless man, kneeling, panting softly in the ice. Shirtless. His pale skin glistens with perspiration, his back lithe and sinewy and heaving with each breath. Her own catches in her throat. Hurt? She can't tell. There's no blood that she can see, no bruises. The snow around his boots is packed firm, mottled with boot prints and flecks of dirt, but nothing that seems to indicate violence. The man rolls his head back, a soft, exhausted exhale coming out in a puff of white, his dark hair falling limp down his back, and — oh Norns, that's the prince.

Word Count: 2,808

Pairing: Loki x Sigyn

A/N: Just a silly thing I wrote after seeing a photo of Tom training for The Night Manger's second season and my friend @lokislittlesigyn had the thought of Loki working out in secret.

Also - this is my fiftieth fic posted! Which is absolutely wild - I was at 32 at the beginning of 2025, and never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I'd get eighteen fics up in one year. Thank you so much to everyone who read anything I wrote this year - I hope to have lots more coming in the next - and I hope you all have a wonderful New Year's and that 2026 treats you well <3

Warnings: None

Tags: @lucywrites02 @gaitwae @whatafuckingdumbass @the-emo-asgardian @imnotrevealingmyname @electroma89 @lokislittlesigyn  @theredrenard @justdontmindmetm @lostgreekgod @naterson @hail-brod

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Read it on Ao3!

Smitten Kitten Loki trying to convince his lady love to come back to bed - do you think he’ll succeed? 😉 Commission for my absolute fave @justheretoread-ao3 🥰

Also, since Much Ado begins tomorrow so we should hopefully be getting some content finally!! Of course, it’ll probably be him and his uniform every day because things don’t change 😁

Happy Birthday Tom!