#011113

‘I have a terrible fear of wasting time... Who knows? Maybe I should relax a bit. Maybe working too hard is wasting time. I have a fear of regret.’

If you need an illustration of how fast and how far Tom Hiddleston’s star has risen in the past three years, compare and contrast his last two appearances at San Diego Comic-Con, the convention where studios tout their forthcoming wares to a ravening army of geeks by whose tweets and posts an action movie will stand or fall. In 2010, Hiddleston sat on stage as Thor director Kenneth Branagh outlined plans for his forthcoming movie, introduced Chris Hemsworth as the titular Norse god, and Hiddleston as his adopted brother and nemesis, Loki. There was a brief Q&A, Hiddleston answered one question, and everyone went home.

Fast forward to 3pm, Saturday 20 July 2013, and in Hall H of the San Diego Convention Centre, ahead of the imminent release of Thor: The Dark World, an army of 6,000 fans repeatedly scream “Loki” in a manner so fevered as to make One Direction concert-goers look like a chapter of tongue-tied Trappists.

Hiddleston, both in character and full Loki costume, is berating the audience, hissing, “Humanity! Look how far you’ve fallen, lining up in the sweltering heat for hours, huddling in the dark, like beasts!” By the time Hiddleston has borrowed a line from Avengers Assemble and addressed the crowd as: “You mewling quim!” and advance footage has shown him appear to chop off Thor’s hand, the roof is ready to blow.

The stunt has been three weeks in the making, beginning with a phone call from Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige to Hiddleston, who was at Wimbledon for the ladies’ quarterfinals. They knock a few ideas back and forth, Hiddleston insists he must stay in character throughout and plans are put in place to maintain complete secrecy. This involves Hiddleston arriving at Comic-Con disguised as Star Wars’ bounty hunter Jango Fett (the only place in the world where such behaviour wouldn’t arouse suspicion).

At 3pm, as Feige is about to address the crowd, Loki appears on stage. “It was a riot,” recalls Hiddleston a few weeks later, sitting in the calmer surroundings of the paved garden at the back of his Haverstock Hill local in north London with a pint of Amstel at hand. “It was mayhem, I [was] in costume, giving a speech, getting people to kneel at my feet. It was deranged and bananas.”

Both adjectives which could equally be applied to everything which has happened in Hiddleston’s life over the past three years, a period which has seen him transform from a respected stage actor with a malnourished film and TV CV to the man who delivered a show-stealing performance complete with epic cavalry charge in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, who Woody Allen asked for by name for his comeback hit Midnight In Paris, who won the part of Prince Hal/Henry V in the BBC’s epic Shakespearean tetralogy (four-parter, to you and me) The Hollow Crown and, as the aforementioned Asgardian bad boy, starred in the biggest film of 2012, Avengers Assemble, which is also the third highest-grossing film of all time.

How did that happen? “Maybe it’s just getting older,” reflects the 32-year-old. “You become so palpably aware this is not a dress rehearsal. There’s a big sign in blazing neon that says You Haven’t Got Long. But I think it takes a beat to learn that. Life has to knock you down in order for you to realise it, because when you’re a kid you think you’re immortal.” “Basically, I’m a madman.”

Conscious perhaps of not repeating himself, over the course of the afternoon Hiddleston prefaces only one of his many stories with the above phrase, but in actual fact, the phrase would fit more than a few. Not that Hiddleston in person fits the description. As he ambles into the pub today, sans entourage, a fleeting look of semi-recognition crosses the barmaid’s face, but it’s clear she hasn’t quite clocked him. He could be the villainous star of the third biggest film of all time, or he could, at a push, be doing well in a digital marketing company in Shoreditch. I ask him if he’s ever worn the Loki hairstyle when he’s out on the town to aid recognition, but he answers in the negative. “It’s very Seventies,” he says, laughing. “If we ever did a Loki origins story he should be running a Seventies nightclub, I think.

Opening scene, you’d see him burst through the double doors, wearing a really lean floral suit, ‘Sympathy For The Devil’ on the soundtrack, say hello to a few girls, get on the decks to spin a few tracks, his hair looking sleek and menacing. I should say my mum’s not sure. She came to the Avengers premiere and she said, 'Darling, it’s a bit severe, isn’t it?’”

His Avengers’ co-star Scarlett Johansson has warned me that “he has a secret sweet tooth - I’ve never seen anyone devour sugar the way he does”, but his physique - like all actors he is startlingly (OK, sickeningly) slimmer in the flesh - betrays no evidence of this dark habit. Is he handsome? It’s a question that seems to exercise a sizeable slice of the internet with his dedicated army of “Hiddlestoners” - like their near-relatives, the “Cumberbitches” - prepared to fight to the death on the point. Of course he is, although with features which betray his Celtic lineage, it’s more of an old Hollywood look. Spielberg has likened him to Errol Flynn and it’s a comparison which seems most relevant.

He seems considerate, too. Certainly, he’s the only person I’ve ever interviewed who’s worried that the rustling noise inherent in the transporting of crisps from packet to mouth might affect the quality of my recording.

So where does the “madman” stuff fit in? Well, here’s one of his favourite memories of playing Loki: “We were shooting on top of a volcano in Iceland,” he recalls with a grin. “There was a fight sequence where Loki has to take a big hit. He’s sort of thrown back and falls on to the ground. I did a real-life high jump, I took a run-up to a mark, did a Fosbury Flop and then, smack!”

On to a mat? “No, on to the surface of the volcano! But then I saw the shot afterwards and whatever was happening in my face, I could never have acted that.”

He segues from this to describing the positives of being accidentally punched in the face by Chris Hemsworth during an action sequence shot for the original Thor. “You don’t make any facial expression when that happens. Just before the blood starts to flow, your face goes incontrovertibly still. It looks great in the film.”

Then with the next breath, Hiddleston - whose interpretation of Loki has been such a success that Thor: The Dark World director Alan Taylor is shooting extra scenes with the actor for the new movie - outlines his ideas about the character. He speaks of Loki occupying “that liminal point between order and chaos”, delivers a brief but erudite tour of the major developments in modern psychology - he will later mention Mark Ruffalo’s “hulking manifestations of the Freudian id” - and concludes by offering several areas of mythological comparison.

There are probably a few actors out there who would be prepared to suffer the kind of knocks that come with hurling oneself backwards on to a rocky volcanic outcrop, but how many of those could also hold their own on In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg?

Hiddleston, as it is compulsory to note in all interviews, was educated at Eton. He went there while his parents - father James, a working-class Scotsman who made his money in the biotech boom of the Nineties, and mother Diana, upper middle-class with a background in theatre - were divorcing. He remembers his dad being bowled over by the fact that the school had 15 football pitches.

Despite Prince William being in the year below - “he seems like a genuinely well-adjusted man, but I feel as remote from or as close to him as you do” - Hiddleston’s memories of his school days are universal rather than exclusive. “Radiohead, Oasis, Blur, meeting girls, playing sport,” he recalls of his teenage years. “I have very, very good friends that I made there, but just like anyone, the friends that you make when you’re growing up are the people who really know you.”

It was one of these friends whose wedding he had promised to attend “even if Spielberg calls”. Of course, Spielberg then called. He missed the wedding.

They fell out. “We have completely made amends and he’s still my best friend,” he says, smiling.

Initially, he was attracted more to rugby than drama, but contemporary Eddie Redmayne remembers him being “fantastic” in a performance of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. Hiddleston only appeared on stage once with Redmayne, as the front leg of an elephant on which Redmayne sat in an adaptation of A Passage To India. “One of my finest hours.”

With straight As in Latin, Greek, English and theatre studies, he won a place at Cambridge to study classics, but before arriving there appeared in a production of RC Sherriff’s First World War drama Journey’s End at Edinburgh which received glowing reviews and alerted his family to his acting potential. “Mum and Dad [and] my sisters came and they all said, independently, that they’d never seen me do anything like that.”

Graduation from Cambridge was followed by Rada where he found himself in the same year as the “chameleon-like” Andrea Riseborough and two years below the “prodigious and electrifying” Ben Whishaw.

He loved it, but on leaving, despite a steady supply of theatre work, he found film and TV elusive.

After much rejection, Joanna Hogg, who’d already featured him in her 2007 debut Unrelated, cast him again as Edward in her family breakdown drama Archipelago. Shortly before this, however, he had landed the role of the cop Martinsson in Kenneth Branagh’s English version of the Scandi-crime drama

Wallander, soon followed by the part of doctor Eugene Lvov in Chekhov’s Ivanov at the Donmar Warehouse, opposite Branagh again. “Suddenly we were staring down the barrel of spending an entire year together,” he laughs. “I remember seeing him at a costume fitting and he said, 'I’m calling this my Hiddleston year!’”

Given that it’s led directly to the role of Loki, his relationship with Branagh has proved the most important professional one of his life so far. Hiddleston recalls the pair bonding over long night shoots on location in southern Sweden and enthuses about Branagh’s intelligence, passion and undimmed work ethic. He shares the knight’s command of the language and with his similar Shakespearean background matched now with big-screen triumphs, has been dubbed his natural successor. For no very good reason, I imagine he can probably do a fair impression of the great man. How would Branagh respond to being asked what he’d like for breakfast? “Well, should one find oneself in the fortunate position of having a choice, for what might be construed as a petit déjeuner, as the French call it,” he begins with a dead-on mastery of Branagh’s unique mix of Belfast brogue and Home Counties RP, “one might possibly prefer, if the hour of the day should demand, to start with a cup of coffee, perhaps a bowl of strawberries and raspberries and, if one was in the fortunate position of requesting a second course, that second course might involve a preparation of eggs, cooked to the inclination of the… and so it goes on. He’s got the gift of the gab. I think it’s an Irish thing. It comes from some Irish love of words. And then he’ll throw in some extraordinary obscenity which will make you laugh!”

When Hiddleston first auditioned for a role in Thor, it wasn’t for villain Loki, but for Thor himself, a role that eventually went to the square-jawed Chris Hemsworth. Asked to bulk up, he put on 20lb of muscle in six weeks to take himself over 14 stone. The producers were impressed and while he failed to land the title role, he’s sure it was this commitment which got him Loki. “I learned a lot from that experience,” he reasons, “particularly, that if you risk failure, then you also risk success.”

Scarlett Johansson confirms how completely Hiddleston has taken this lesson to heart. “Tom Hiddleston is my absolute hero,” she giggles. “He’s clinically enthusiastic. Doing a scene with him is like playing tennis with Venus Williams. He’s just always there to hit the ball back no matter which direction it’s coming from. He’s got a powerful serve!”

We break off the interview to order burgers, chips and another round. His only concession to healthy living: a side order of green vegetables. Testament to his good manners, Hiddleston later emails me to clarify a quote he couldn’t remember and thank me for dinner.

They’re good burgers, but at £25 each so they should be. Later, I get the chance to ask that ultimate arbiter of what constitutes a tasty burger, Samuel L Jackson, who starred opposite Hiddleston in Avengers Assemble, for his memories of working with him. “He’s prepared and that’s important for me,” reasons Jackson. “He’s a guy who’s ready to go and he has a plan. He’s open to what the other actors are doing, very complementary to the other talent around him in terms of giving them something to work with and returning something when you give it to him. A lot of actors are like blank pages: you write on them and nothing happens. Tom is very responsive.”

Tom Hiddleston’s next two post-Thor releases are vampire movie Only Lovers Left Alive, directed by “one of the great men” Jim Jarmusch and co-starring Tilda Swinton, and Muppets Most Wanted (out next spring), which will see him dancing, or “organised flailing” as he puts it, alongside the likes of Tina Fey and Ricky Gervais. One of the projects sees him create a character called Adam who “might have been a good candidate to play Hamlet, if he’d ever been played by Syd Barrett” and he describes it as “the most sophisticated film I’ve ever been in” while the other is “the silliest thing I’ve ever done” with “a laugh-out-loud script.” You decide which is which. And just to keep things fresh he’s currently in rehearsals for Coriolanus, which opens at the Donmar Warehouse in December.

With other projects forming an orderly holding pattern, most recently the news that he will be revisiting his Loki villainy as the voice of Captain Hook in Disney’s Tinker Bell And The Pirate Fairy, it’s small wonder that he feels his time is now. “I honestly feel like I’m just beginning,” he says. “I feel like I’ve just passed 'Go’ for the first time and it’s time to play. Men are lucky in this game, because between 30 and 50 is when the really juicy parts start to come along and I’m 32, so I feel I’m in a really good spot.”

For now though he’s listening to a lot of the National, despite being as he puts it “at the vanguard of Daft Punk’s fan base for as long as I can remember” and, well, he’d rather not talk about his personal life, despite rumours that he’s dating Jane Arthy, a record executive who sat alongside him when he watched Andy Murray’s Wimbledon triumph. “I understand the curiosity,” he says. “One day I hope when there’s really something to write home about, then I’ll be able to talk.”

His obsession at the moment is an odd one: the story of French yachtsman Bernard Moitessier, who was involved in a legendary 1968-1969 round-the-world race which led to the suicide of Englishman Donald Crowhurst. The Frenchman was on the point of winning when he was told he was going to be greeted by a flotilla of small boats and taken on a victory parade. Moitessier wrote a note on a piece of paper and catapulted it on to a passing liner.

Hiddleston takes up the story. “The note read: 'I am a member of the greatest nation on earth, which is the nation of sea and sky, the idea of records and races seems so absurd to me now that I have decided to pull out of the race.’ So he went round the world again and settled in Tahiti! He felt so at peace. It’s a kind of modern Odyssey. He faces his greatest fears, and he sees truly monstrous seas and yet he probably has seen more beauty on that one trip than any of us do in our lifetimes. And you think, that man is alive and I want to get close to that in some way. To lean into the wind, to lean into your fears. It’s a metaphor for overcoming disappointments… I could go on!”

What does he fear? “I have a terrible fear of wasting time,” he replies, before pausing to consider the question further. “Who knows? Maybe I should relax a bit. Maybe working too hard is wasting time. I have a fear of regret. I’m not afraid of death, although I know that sounds odd.”