#posthumus

answering this publicly hope thats ok! cant do a readmore im on mobile *****asteroid city spoilers below beware*****

i dont remember anyones names so this is gonna sound partly unhinged. okay so the edward norton playwright and jason schwartzman actor (not character, in the black and white parts) are lovers right. tbh i thought this was kind of a gag and forgot about it. but later we find out that the playwright died 6 months into the production. i didnt make the connection that THAT’s why the actor-jason has to suddenly leave the stage and freaks out backstage about how he’s not sure he’s Doing it right. hes not talking about acting!! because he himself is literally grieving his lover while he’s playing a character who’s grieving his wife written by his lover so obviously it’s too much!!! actor-jason is trying to find meaning in his death through his writing but there isnt any meaning in death [gerris drinkwater voice] which is what the play is trying to say anyway. he doesnt think he’s performing grief right even in his own life!!! (and tbh it’s the 50s so he wouldnt be able to perform grief publicly anyway!!!!) the play starts with a car accident… anyone would search for some hidden meaning there, some sign…. so when he talks to margot robbie outside it’s not really about finding the CHARACTER’s motivations it’s about the actor himself being able to process the playwright’s death! and adrien brody director was probably also dealing with that too (him and norton seemed to be good buddies) so the whole “sleeping backstage” thing gets a bit sadder maybe? maybe everyone else got this in the theatre and im just stupid lol but crazy making stuff to me!!! the whole story is about sublimated gay grief that cannot be expressed?!?!

TOM HIDDLESTON - POSTHUMUS AND CLOTEN / CYMBELINE (2007)

Tom Hiddleston as Posthumus and Cloten in "Cymbeline" in 2007.

Cymbeline

'Posthumus/Cloten'

Cheek By Jowl, February - July, 2007

As he returns to the London stage in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, look back at Tom Hiddleston’s theatre career, including his early roles with Cheek by Jowl, Coriolanus and his hot-ticket Hamlet.

Tom Hiddleston as Alsemero in Declan Donnellan’s 2006 staging of The Changeling at the Barbican, London.

Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

In a review of the Cheek By Jowl production, Michael Billington described it as a dark Jacobean masterpiece, in which ‘madness, as much as passion, spins the plot’.

Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Hiddleston appeared in another Cheek By Jowl production, Cymbeline, at the Barbican in 2007.

Photograph: Alastair Muir/Rex/Shutterstock

As designer Nick Ormerod recalled, Hiddleston as Posthumus delivered ‘a brilliantly cringeworthy’ boyband number. Here he is with Jodie McNee as Imogen.

Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

For a 2013 performance in a ‘fast, witty, intelligent’ Coriolanus at the Donmar Warehouse, ‘Hiddleston gives us a man ultimately destroyed by his own headlong nature’, wrote Billington.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Hiddleston took on Shakespeare again, reuniting with his Ivanov director Kenneth Branagh, in an intimate 2017 production of Hamlet to raise funds for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Photograph: Johan Persson

‘The occasion,’ wrote Billington in a four-star review, ‘was remarkable for the traditionalism of Branagh’s production, the romanticism of Hiddleston’s Hamlet and the rapt concentration of the audience’.

Photograph: Johan Persson

He added: ‘If I had to pick out Hiddleston’s key quality, it would be his ability to combine a sweet sadness with an incandescent fury. He suggests a fierce intellect gnawed by intense melancholy and yet subject to bouts of intemperate rage’.

Photograph: Johan Persson

Hiddleston in rehearsals for Betrayal, considered one of Harold Pinter’s finest plays and the final instalment in Jamie Lloyd’s Pinter at the Pinter season.

Photograph: Marc Brenner

Hiddleston will play Robert in a story of two couples entangled in a seven-year affair – it was inspired by Pinter’s relationship with Joan Bakewell.

Michael C. Hall as Posthumus and Liev Schreiber as Iachimo in the Shakespeare in the Park production of Cymbeline directed by Andrei Serban, 1998.