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Tom Hiddleston has had a busy few years, jumping from blockbuster-sized movies like Thor, in which he tackles the character of Loki, to quietly slipping into the shoes of country legend Hank Williams in I Saw the Light. And now he stars in Ben Wheatley’s grotesque adaption of J.G. Ballard’s 1970s sci-fi novel, High-Rise, opening in the U.S. on May 13.

Hiddleston portrays Dr. Robert Laing, the newest resident in a luxurious high-rise tower block that provides all the conveniences of modern life. Things, however, quickly turn to madness and debauchery as power failures spread through the building and tensions amongst neighbors escalate. The opening scene, in which Dr. Laing calmly sits, spit-roasting a dog is a good indication of what one might expect.

Hiddleston spoke with Esquire about the challenges of taking on such drastically different characters, the ways in which he prepared for such a disturbing film, and how J. G. Ballard’s visions for the future eerily came true.

ESQ: I have to confess. As I was watching High-Rise, it struck me just how much this condo I’ve been renting reminds me of the building in the movie. But nobody has killed anybody yet. To my knowledge.

Tom Hiddleston: [Laughs] Hey, those elevator shafts. You want to make sure the lifts keep working!

OK. I’m starting to feel exceedingly paranoid! Speaking of the movie and not at all of a plausible real-life scenario: You’ve played so many different characters. How do you find yourself within all of them?

That’s a really great question, and it’s one that nobody has ever asked. I truly feel like the duty of an actor is to expand into unknown territory. I had an acting teacher once who told me that you have to have an elastic band around your waist and it has to stretch—to encircle other people. In the end, it’s an amazing way to live, because by playing different people, or at least defending the view points of different people (which acting has to be), you find yourself in contexts which are always alien and unfamiliar. You come away from those experiences feeling a bit more full and feeling like you know the world a little bit better.

As an actor, when you’re working on these bigger projects as opposed to more “independently budgeted” films…does it make a difference to you?

High-Rise was a tiny film by the way. It was made for 6 million pounds, which is about $8.5 million.

Right. Or like $12 million Canadian. See, the numbers keep going up.

All right. [Laughs] $12 million Canadian. It [still] felt like a small film, and we shot it very quickly. The process is just to do the best you can. Work, work as hard as you can and be diligent and respectful…

Do you love them equally, or do you have a preference?

I do. I find different things to love about them. They express different parts of my own fascination, my own interests. Everything I do is always about the human condition, what it means to be alive in some form or other—even if it’s a big blockbuster. That’s what cinema is about.

With High-Rise, which is a bit more abstract and experimental, how do you make sense of it? How do you approach your character in the midst of all this chaos?

I wanted to sync up with Ben. I always do that when I sign on to a film: I try to sync up with the tone of what a director is trying to do. I ask them to give me some movies to watch, give me some books to read, give me some music to listen to—to try and find a framework they are working in so I can place myself within it. So I think I knew what I was in for. And I love Ben’s work. He’s rebellious and he’s mischievous and has his own singular sense of humor and taste. The most fascinating thing for me was that Laing is reactive, whereas other people are proactive. He’s quiet and watchful, while the other inhabitants are sliding into a kind of chaos.

Chaos would be an understatement. But Laing is rather detached, isn’t he?

Because of his profession as a physiologist I think he has a kind of an intellectual detachment about disease and human impulses, so he’s able to withdraw emotionally from the psychological impact of this feral chaos.

What were the challenges in portraying him?

I found that he’s a character who has a lot of private guilt and shame. He’s moved into this building to get away from the complexities of life. He’s trying to stay detached, and he actually can’t. It’s all about his unprocessed guilt. There’s a lot of guilt going around, he’s trying to get away from real life. He wants to live in a grey flat and wear a grey suit and not be affected.

I took my cue from the book, and I found it fascinating that J.G. Ballard choses his leading character to be a physiologist, someone who understands the mechanical engineering of the human brain and body. And so I took that on and did some research. I went to talk to a forensic pathologist in a hospital in England, and I watched him perform some real life autopsies, which were actually very hard to stomach. I almost fainted.

That’s probably a good sign.

I wanted to understand the perspective of the people who do that every day, who have a sensitivity to that kind of work but also have the scientific rigor. They can actually deconstruct a body and [determine] the cause of death. These are the people we depend on in our society, and if someone falls dead in the middle of the street, the forensic pathologist will cut them open and tell us why.

I’d just assume it’s the work of a serial killer and call it a day. Why do you think we have this fascination with dystopian movies and books?

I don’t know, I think we’re always fascinated by our nightmares. We have hopes and dreams. As human beings, we’d like to believe that our society is getting better, more equal, more fair, more healthy, more balanced—and we fear that it’s getting worse. More toxic, more unequal, more sick. And dystopian nightmares are always manifestations of our fears: that the world is going to hell in a handcart and that we can’t stop it.

But I think that they can also be very playful. Think of all the disaster movies. That’s another version of that nightmare, the fear of the apocalypse. Whether that’s Terminator 2, or Robinson Crusoe being stranded on a deserted island, or Cast Away. I think there’s something very child-like about imagining who you might be on a deserted island.

It’s interesting that you use the word “nightmare"—as you watch the movie, it feels like you’re trapped in one…wait, now I get it!

[Laughs] Yeah! I think Ben would be thrilled with that.

The book is set in the ‘70s, so what’s the relevance of some of the issues that the movie is tackling?

I think Ballard saw things coming. He used to say it’s as if he was standing roadside with a warning [sign] saying "dangerous bend ahead,” because the human race is progressing at such a velocity. We are hurtling towards progress and the future. He predicted our attachment to technology. He saw it coming.

There’s an interview of him in 1978 saying that we’re going to take a lot more pictures, we’ll all have access to video footage, we’re going to become the stars of our own films, photographs will become much easier to reproduce, we’ll take pictures of our food, we’ll take pictures of each other, and we’ll take pictures of ourselves in our bedroom. He’s basically predicting Instagram, social media, and YouTube 30 years before they were conceived. So I think he understood that there was a marriage between psychology and technology, which was coming around.

Right now, there’s a lot of talk about the classes, the 1%, and all that. We definitely see plenty of that class struggle reflected in the film, don’t we?

It’s a very obvious metaphor. There’s unequal access to the resources in the building, depending on where you live. The people on the lower floors are furious that in the penthouse they still have electricity [while] the lights go out in the basement, or that the swimming pool is closed to children from the lower floors. There’s a righteous moral anger about inequality that’s being told there. And perhaps Ballard is saying that it’s inevitable. He’s saying that it’s part of the human condition, some sort of striving for status.

It’s interesting that as soon as people go for their inner wishes, their animal desires, if you will, once all structure is taken away, their inclination is to do all these horrible things…

Perhaps Ballard is saying: Who are we really? Who are we in extremity? If no one is watching and no one is there to stop us, what will we do?

Well, he seems to think that we would do very bad things…do you agree?

[Laughs] We would do different things. And what your definition of “bad” is where you stand.

True. But I’m not sure if everything is quite so morally ambivalent.

I don’t think so either, but our moral compass is conditioned by society. For example, I’m sort of playing devil’s advocate. We think it’s OK to eat beef and lamb and chicken, but we think it’s wrong to eat dog. It’s societally not problematic to eat steak, but it is problematic to eat a piece of dog. And it’s only because someone decided that hundreds of years ago. If that was the only access to food you had, you might have to do it? And that’s what Ballard is interested in: When you’re really pushed, when it comes down to a matter of life or death, what are you prepared to do?

When you’re doing a role like this—or any role really, you’re sort of putting yourself on the line, while at the same time saying, “I can do this.” So where do you find that confidence as an actor?

I honestly don’t know. I think it’s a desire to challenge myself. It comes back to that thing I was saying about expansion and wanting to stretch and grow. It’s the same reason people travel, you know? When you’re born, you get used to your cot and your crib. And then you get used to your bedroom. Then you get used to your family home, and your school and your town. And then eventually you want to get out of that—you want to broaden your horizons, and the process of being an actor is that. I feel like I want to travel far and wide, and that’s why I choose to do different projects. I don’t know where the confidence comes from. I think it comes more from curiosity than confidence.

I guess that’s the great thing about an actor. You’re not limited to having just one life, or one occupation. You get to experience so many.

Letizia recycling a black and white blouse by Mango

March 1, 2012: “Rare Diseases World Day”

May 16, 2012: “Caja Madrid Foundation Grants” ceremony

I just watched 2012 Team K 4th stage revival and Sayaka did the speech. Does anyone know what Sayaka said at the end that made everyone laugh?

Tom Hiddleston smells amazing—overwhelmingly so—as I walk into his hotel room on the 10th floor of the Crosby Hotel in New York City. I can't quite pick out his cologne, but I later described it as "heaven" to everyone I know. "Hello! Tea?" he chirps in his charming British accent as he opens the door for me. Hiddleston has that kind of presence where it's hard to formulate words around him. "Ha ha, it's 4:20 on 4/20 and your fans are called Hiddlestoners," is the first thing I blurt out. I've been waiting to make that joke to him all day, but it falls flatter than I expected. He laughs to be polite, or maybe just out of pity.

The 35-year-old actor is wearing an exceptionally well-fitted blue suit that Wednesday afternoon and gray-framed glasses that add even more allure. Most actors turn out to be smaller in person, but Hiddleston's 6'2" frame—with seemingly mile-long legs—looks even more slender in person. While he's the epitome of dashing, his room is kind of a mess. Fed-Ex boxes are littered all over the place, suitcases are scattered, open, and half-stuffed with half-folded clothes. "Sorry, it's a mess," he apologizes as I navigate my way to the couch. "I'm packing up. I've been traveling for about 10 years." Hiddleston really has been all over the place lately. He's solidified himself in the Marvel Universe as Thor villain Loki (a role he will reprise in 2017's Thor: Ragnarok), just starred as Hank Williams in the biopic I Saw the Light, starred opposite Jessica Chastain in Guillermo del Toro's fantastical period horror Crimson Peak last year, plays a hotel manager-turned-spy in AMC's new TV series The Night Manager, and next year will appear in the new King Kong movie (Kong: Skull Island) with Oscar-winner Brie Larson. So yeah, he's got a lot on his plate.

When we talked, he was floating through Tribeca Film Festival to promote yet another new film of his, High-Rise, director Ben Wheatley's stylish dystopian adaptation of J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel. In the film, Hiddleston plays the middle-class Dr. Robert Laing, who lives in a society where the poor live on the lower levels of a high-rise building while the rich live on top. Laing gets caught in the middle of a class war with his neighbors, played by Sienna Miller, Elisabeth Moss, Luke Evans, and Jeremy Irons, who portrays the building's rich architect and penthouse resident. We talked plenty about High-Rise, but also about his famous Hiddlebum (which serves a symbolic purpose in High-Rise), his love for dancing, and the stomach-churning preparation he had to do for the movie.

You play a doctor in the film. The scene where you tear apart flesh from a skull was kind of hard to watch. You had some horrifying scenes in Crimson Peak as well. Do you get squeamish watching those scenes?

No, but I got squeamish when I was doing my research. I actually attended an autopsy because I knew I was going to have to perform a dissection. I simply had no frame of reference and I wanted to do it properly. I didn't know how to make incisions, so I went to see a forensic pathologist who showed me how to do it, which was quite stomach-churning. But it was fascinating, listening to him talk about the biomechanics of our engineering. As human beings, we often forget that we are machines, made up of machine parts, and if certain things are broken then that will have an effect on our behavior.

I think that scene's a declaration of intent by Ben [Wheatley]. You see Dr. Laing peeling the facial tissue off her head to reveal the blood and the bones beneath. I think that's sort of what Ballard is doing to society. He's saying, "Let me take away the surface and show you the flesh and blood beneath."

Speaking of this movie and Crimson Peak, directors seem to love shooting your bare butt. I'm sure you know the nickname you've been given: Hiddlebum.

It's there. [Points to butt.] And there it is.

It's an Internet sensation.

It's one of those things that I've never really thought about because the nudity has always been part of the story and it's never felt gratuitous. It's always felt as if it's in service of something. In High-Rise, it's quite symbolic. Laing moves into the building to get away from the entanglements of real life. And the first thing he does in this new clean, clinical space is take all his clothes off and sunbathe. And within seconds, that peace and freedom is interrupted. And then he never takes his clothes off again. And that's in the novel. I felt it was kind of important, and honestly, you don't see anything more than you would see if I was just walking down the beach, so I didn't have a problem with it.

The party scenes in this movie are so intoxicating. Did the parties ever go on after the cameras stopped rolling?

The parties were so fun because we would set them up and, of course, there's no real alcohol, but there is real music and Ben would put on music and we'd start dancing. The camera would stay rolling, and he would say, "Crazy, go crazy, dance more crazy, more crazy dancing." He would gently encourage everybody to get a little more wild, but there was something very safe about it.

We're all familiar with your amazing dancing skills. I've got to know if that dream sequence where you're dancing with those flight attendants was your idea.

It actually was my idea. But it wasn't my idea to dance. We shot it at the end of our first day. We were due to wrap at 6 p.m. and at 5:45 they started doing that scene. These flight attendants were walking down the corridor and I was watching it and I said to Ben, "Do you think that Laing should be a participant in his own dream?" And he said, "Well, yeah, it'd be nice to have the option." I asked, "What do you think he should be doing? Is he walking in front of them or behind them?" And then he said, "He should be dancing with them." So we did it, and we did it once. We put on Sister Sledge's "Lost in Music" and we danced down the corridor. It was great.

Do you remember the first moment you fell in love with dancing?

When I first danced ever?

Yeah, when did you discover the rhythm of your body?

[Laughs.] I don't know, actually. I have a very happy memory. My mom used to play the piano for me and my older sister when we were very, very small, about 3 or 4. There was no furniture in the living room of the new house that we had moved into so my sister and I would dance around the living room. It's one of my earliest memories and it's a very happy one. I was just dancing to my mom playing the piano and she had these three things she used to play. And then beyond that, I don't remember dancing or enjoying dancing until I was about 15. I started to go out to parties and playing music and being introduced to girls and wanting to impress them.

If you're a good dancer, it's much easier to get girls...

I couldn't possibly attest to that.

Please. 

[Laughs].

You do these stylistic British films and then you're Loki from the Marvel movies. Do you notice the different ways people receive you in different places?

The Marvel films have an extraordinary reach. Loki is the most well-known character I've ever played. But when I was in Louisiana, people had seen me in Coriolanus onstage in London and people have already seen my new TV show, The Night Manager.

You're such a unique chameleon of an actor.  

I get huge pleasure from challenging myself and surprising an audience by doing different things. But that's partly because I think all human beings contain enormous range and complexity. We're capable of huge courage, and love, and kindness, but we're also capable of cruelty and inconsistency, and solitude and loneliness, and all these things that we all suffer as much as the next person.​ My pleasure is trying to express that.

Have you seen that Reductress article about yourself? It's a satirical women's site. I have to show you this article: "9 Times Tom Hiddleston Left You Breathless and Alone in the Woods."