Tom Hiddleston: ‘I love doing big screen blockbusters but I’ll still do arthouse and theatre’

The British A-lister wants to maintain diversity in his career 
Jennifer Ruby7 March 2017
The Weekender

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Tom Hiddleston has vowed to keep doing small arthouse films and theatre alongside Hollywood blockbusters — and has revealed he is keen to return to his West End roots.

The actor, 36, is starring in new monster movie Kong: Skull Island and has appeared in Marvel Comics superhero films as villain Loki.

He also recently acted in Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, based on the J G Ballard science-fiction classic, and told the Standard he wants to keep making diverse choices. “That’s what I always wished for,” he said.

“The actors I respected growing up seemed to pop up in different things — big pieces of entertainment, small arthouse films, theatre — and I think that it keeps it all fresh. I love it all and the idea I could get to make little bits of it all is appealing to me.”

(WARNER BROS)
Warners Bros

Hiddleston — who won an Olivier Award for his role in Cymbeline in 2007, and an Evening Standard Theatre Award for playing Coriolanus in 2014 — said he wants to get back on the West End stage soon.

“I hope so, I’m not quite sure when,” he said. “As long as I’m an actor I’ll always come back to the theatre, it feels like home in lots of ways.

"I spent my whole twenties on stage and I trained in London so the West End still feels very close to me. I have a couple [of plays] on the wish list but I don’t want to jinx it.”

Hiddleston stars with Brie Larson, Samuel L Jackson and John Goodman in Jordan Vogt-Roberts’s take on the King Kong franchise.

Kong: Skull Island experience at Madame Tussauds London

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“I wanted to do it because it was an old-fashioned adventure and I’d never done anything like that before and I loved that type of film growing up,” he said.

“The monsters was part of it, but I loved Kong since I was a child. The combination of playing an explorer in an adventure film with this icon of movies was really appealing.”

The actor plays SAS operative Captain James Conrad in the film, which was shot in Hawaii, Vietnam and Australia over five months.

The cast formed a close bond. He said: “We’re from different places in the world, thrown together in the valley of a dormant volcano — you get close pretty quickly. We bonded off set. Brie organised weekends of activities, we’d go go-karting — I was terrible. Brie’s actually really good at it.”

Kong: Skull Island is out on Thursday

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