Why does he love Much Ado about nothing?

The A.V. Club: Do you have a favorite Shakespeare play you haven’t been in?
Tom Hiddleston: Immediately the one that comes to my head is Much Ado About Nothing. I think it’s the most beautiful, warm, redemptive, compassionate play that he ever wrote. I suppose the reason I say that is because it’s full of such deft, fine, subtle, brilliant comedy. I mean, really amazing bravura moments of setpiece, laugh-out-loud moments. When you get actors who have digested and studied and thought about and understood the verse and the characterizations, it feels as though it was written yesterday, or it sounds like it’s being made up on the spot. I’ve seen so many adaptations of it. I saw Joss Whedon’s film most recently. I grew up on Kenneth Branagh’s film. I’ve seen amazing productions on stage in London. I saw Simon Russell Beale play Benedick and it was hilarious, at the National Theatre with Zoë Wanamaker. David Tennant did it with Catherine Tate playing Beatrice. I’ve seen it set in ’30s Italy. I’ve seen it set in contemporary Los Angeles. I’ve seen it set 400 years ago. It never fails to delight. It just leaves people with a very, very happy feeling in their heart, I think.
And I think the reason is that it’s about love. It’s about your last chance. You might have sworn off finding the right person and think, “Love’s not for me. Marriage isn’t for me. I will die a bachelor, or I will die a maid. None of your romance, none of your love poems.” It’s about these two old cynics who are like, “Nah, it’s not going to happen for me.” And it does. I think that’s just very redemptive and sweet. And there’s one extraordinary aspect of the play, which is that when Hero’s chastity is in doubt—it’s called into question because of the plot of Don John—an extraordinary thing happens, which is almost unique in all of Shakespeare, which is the man, Benedick, takes the side of the women in blind faith. So he says to Claudio and Don Pedro, I think, “What you’ve done is appalling. This is an act of brutality.” He doesn’t explicitly say that, but it’s an amazing thing where the leading male character takes the side of the women, and I think it’s, yet again, evidence of Shakespeare’s extraordinary compassion and understanding of human nature.
AVC: It’s interesting, especially for that time, because it’s a play that’s seems almost as if it could end tragically and then it doesn’t.
TH: Yeah.Cymbeline is quite like that, which I was in about six years ago. It’s one of his very last plays and it’s quite busy. It’s almost like a greatest hits: There are star-crossed lovers and the girl dresses up as a man and there’s long lost brothers… [Laughs.] and a very Iago-like villain and kings and queens and princes and a song and mistaken identity. It feels like he’s put all of his greatest plot devices in the same thing. You’ve got Romeo And Juliet, you’ve got As You Like It, Othello and sexual jealousy, and war in it. He’s kind of pulling all his strands into one big cake of a play. It looks—toward the end of the play, kind of act-five area—it’s going to end badly, then on a dime it turns, there are all these amazing revelations, and you realize the characters you thought were dead are still alive. Fathers and sons who were separated and forgotten are suddenly reunited, and it’s something that’s narratively very neat. But also, I think, as an audience, following a story, being swept along by the sweep, the arc of a narrative, it’s always delightful when there’s a twist. It could be a kind of twist that makes you punch the air. It could be a twist that melts your heart. I think we’re still delighted by that. Like in The Bourne Ultimatum, you think it’s the end of Jason Bourne, and then he swims away and you think “Oh! You’re still alive!” We love a good narrative twist.
AVC: In Much Ado there are three parts for men of different ages. Of those parts, which would you most like to play?
TH: I would love to play Benedick. Absolutely. It’s very much on my wish list. He’s so funny. He’s such an old dog. And there’s such fine wit in the way he speaks. And he’s a warrior, too. I think if you embrace the idea of a classical career, in the old sense of the word “career,” you have a good stab at all the big ones, at the moment I’m playing a lot of soldiers. I’ve played Posthumus in Cymbeline, Cassio in Othello, Prince Hal, Henry V, I’m about to play Coriolanus. They’re all soldiers. They’re all warriors. And what’s nice about Benedick is he is a warrior, but he’s a warrior who falls in love. So I feel it’s sort of a logical progression. There are some other princes I haven’t played yet, too.
AVC: Do you have favorite moments from the play that you think of as particularly humorous or really funny scenes?
TH: I love the scene when the three guys trick Benedick into thinking that Beatrice is in love with him. It’s just like pure gold. I’ve never seen that scene not be funny. When they are staging a conversation, which they know Benedick will overhear, and it just hits him like a train. He has that beautiful line, “Love me? [Beat.] Why?” [Laughs.] Because the story’s been set up that they hate each other until that point. I love that scene.
AVC: So much of Shakespeare is about analyzing the verse, about understanding the subtleties of the language. When you sit down as an actor and start looking at one of his plays, how do you approach that question?
TH: I think it’s really about trying to communicate the power of the writing to the audience in the most vivid and accessible way. Like most rhetoric, if you own the images, if you own the language, if you own what you’re saying, it will always be expressed. It will always be understood by your audience. So it’s really just enjoying the relationship that you instinctively have with the verse. I feel it’s a very instinctive approach, and images always pop up in my head. I suppose the unconscious thing that’s happening is when I’m speaking the verse I’m seeing the image myself. I’m working on Coriolanus at the moment, and there are some moments in that where he refers to the enemy, Aufidius, he says, “He is a lion that I am proud to hunt.” It’s a very easy thing to see, but whenever I say the word I see the lion. And what an extraordinary thing to say about your opposite number. Or he’s before the gates of battle, he says, “Now put your shields before your hearts, and fight with hearts more proof than shields.” You’re like, [Exhales.] “I’d follow you into battle.”
I think the writing is just so visceral. In the Henry plays, for example, I find it very inspiring. Henry V is presented with an army who are outnumbered 10-to-1 to the French and they’re dispirited, tired, and dying of dysentery. They are unquestionably going to lose. They are the underdogs. And he appeals to something ancient called honor. And he says,

“By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honor,
I am the most offending soul alive.”

It makes me want to pick up a sword and fight for him.

“God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honor
As one man more, methinks, would share from me
For the best hope I have.”

And I don’t really know how I process the lines, which apart from the fact that it lifts me up and into it in a way.

“Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.”

It’s like, “You’re either in it to win it, or you’re out. I’m giving you a chance to leave, now.” In terms of my relationship with the verse, it’s very hard to articulate quite how I work with it apart from that I get very excited about it and it draws me toward it. The rhythm of it, the language of it, and I think he’s such an instinctively compassionate and intelligent writer that quite often the language of the character tells you everything you need to know about what that character is thinking and feeling at that moment.
In Henry V, I think the things that he says in certain moments surprise Henry V himself. There, sieging the French castle of Harfleur, he sees his entire army running away. They’ve made a breach in the wall. They’re running away, and he says, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” Because it’s such a famous line, it’s become quoted out of context, but when you think of it, it’s actually him saying, “No, one more time. Let’s try and make a break through this castle wall one more time.” “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Or close the wall up with our English dead.” It’s like we either go through, or we’ll close the wall back up with dead bodies. And then makes this extraordinary thing,

“In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;”

Those images are just like, “It’s all well and good in peacetime [to] be humble, be still, be gentle, but when it’s wartime unleash the beast.” I mean, Survivor wrote a rock song about it, “Eye Of The Tiger.” It’s the same image. It’s the same stuff.

“Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage
…
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On!”

Al Pacino tried to do it better in Any Given Sunday, but it’s the best locker-room speech in the history of dramatic literature. So yeah, that’s how I approach the verses. I find it amazingly inspiring and contemporary.
AVC: Prince Hal is one of the most famous roles in Shakespeare. What were you surprised by when you sat down to pull apart this role and start thinking about it?
TH: I knew I had to make decisions, I knew I had to make personal decisions about how accidental or premeditated his transformation is, because he’s the heir to the throne; he stands to inherit the kingdom. He’s the son of the top dog and will be top dog himself one day, and he, at the beginning of the play, is undergoing a wild and indulgent rebellion, hanging out with all the people he shouldn’t be. He’s in the pub, roaring drunk, with thieves and whores and lowlifes when he should be taking responsibility and behaving like a future king. And there are versions, there are academic theories, people will bandy these theories about until kingdom come, but as an actor you have to make a choice as to what extent Hal consciously plotted his transformation. He has this amazing speech at the beginning,

“Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.”

So he’s saying, “I am like a radiant sun and I’m going to let myself, my reputation, be veiled by these lowlifes, these thieves, but one day I will throw them off and people will be even more amazed.” Some people have treated that as an enormous act of almost Machiavellian malice, like it makes it almost psychopathic, but I think it’s just him saying, “The music is going to stop someday and the party is going to end and I will have to be king, so I’m going to enjoy myself now.”
I couldn’t get inside a sort of disingenuous Hal, in a way. Some of it is there. There’s a sort of bookend in the pub scene where Hal and Falstaff are playing a game, playing dress-up, and they’re staging a scene between Henry IV and Hal, and at the very end Falstaff gets very sentimental and says, “When you’re king, don’t get rid of me. Keep me close, even though I am an old, fat drunk, because I’m your friend and I love you and don’t banish me.” I think when Hal says, “I do, I will,” I think there’s a sort of admission of inevitability and regret that takes them both by surprise.
But, of course, like life, best-laid plans are often refuted. Hal couldn’t possibly predict that at the end of [Henry IV] Part 2 Falstaff would personally interrupt his coronation and make him look like an idiot. I think Hal knows that he’s going to have to grow up one day, but he doesn’t know that he’s going to have to be so ruthless.
I think it’s a really classical arc of a young man, a young man in any time, in any country, in any place. Essentially testing his limits, pushing the envelope, stretching his boundaries, trying different things on for size and then eventually deciding to take responsibility and become an adult. And the adult he decides to become is King Henry V.

Favourite Loki Moments by Tom Hiddleston

“May I say, before I begin – these are in no particular order? Good. Let’s go…”

Frost Giant

One. The scene between Loki and Odin in Thor where Loki finds out he is a Frost Giant. Playing that scene with Sir Anthony Hopkins was an amazing day. I’m really proud of it.
That scene is basically the anchor of the entire characterisation. It’s very, very important to me. I knew it was an important scene in the script and I knew how I wanted to play it. Yeah, that’s a big moment for me.
[When he says] “Tell me”. So it’s when Loki demands to be told who he is. “Because I’m the monster that parents tell their children about at night.”

Cane Scene

Two. Walking down the steps of the Halls of Justice in Cleveland, which were doubling as a museum in Stuttgart in The Avengers, dressed in a black suit and carrying sort of the Fred Astaire cane version of Loki’s staff, and flipping it, literally like a cane, and smacking a security guard in the face.
It was so fun because there was something of a showman’s elegance about it. It was Loki’s emergence from the underground in The Avengers. It was all going to be set to this amazing piece of Schubert, as it was. Joss’s script described: Loki flips his staff.
And in the same beat, forehands a security guard across the face. And we did it in one take. I felt like I was seven years old when I was doing it.

Mewling Quim

 The scene with Scarlett, number three. The scene between Black Widow and Loki in the cell on the Helicarrier halfway through The Avengers. That whole day was amazing. “Mewling quim.” Scarlett and I had an amazing time playing that scene.
I remember, we shot it on a Monday, and we spent all weekend running it at her house. It was really funny. Whenever I got to “mewling quim” – I’ve never told anyone this – I couldn’t say it because we would collapse into a fit of giggles.
And I wondered if I was going to be able to say it and look her in the face without laughing. It just so happens I did. It was alright on the night, but I love that moment.

Vs Hulk

Number four. There is the moment just before Loki is smashed by the Hulk, which is when he gets up off the floor and says, “I am a God, you dull creature, and I will not be bullied by an animal.”

But before he gets the word “animal” out, he is whipped out of frame, about to be smashed like a wet fish all over the floor of Stark Tower.
Before we shot it, there was a wire attached to my right foot with three stuntmen on the other end. I remember working with them to time it. I said, “If you pull on the B-U-L of ‘bullied’, then I’ll be out of frame before I can finish my line.” it was just a very funny shot. It was like slipping on a banana skin. It was old school farce. I love that moment.

The Car Chase

Number five. Better be good. Number five is the car chase at the beginning ofThe Avengers, which was cut down for good reason, but we shot it in these ancient mushroom tunnels in Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, about two hours outside Pittsburgh.
For most of the course of the 21st century, these tunnels provided the world with about 60% of the mushrooms. Who knew that. There’s something like 150 miles of subterranean mushroom tunnels underneath the forest in Pennsylvania, and we shot the entire car chase over two or three days down there.
It feels like you’re driving into the Bat Cave, that’s what it feels like. They are very, very far underground and they are very, very dark and very, very long.
So it was myself and Cobie Smulders and Jeremy Renner and Stellan Skarsgård. Jeremy and Stellan and I are in this 4X4.
This just after the stealing of the Tesseract. In the film, it’s actually quite a short trip, but it was two days’ worth of shooting to get all that footage. It was amazing being on the back of this 4X4, driving 200/300 yards’ worth of mushroom tunnel, being chased by another 4X4 with all the cameras on it. It’s incredibly thrilling – I think because there’d been so much green screen, and that was all real. We were actually in a 4X4.

Chris Hemsworth

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention something with Chris. It’s the moment where Thor and Loki are standing shoulder to shoulder, staring up at Laufey in Jotunheim in the first Thor film. It was the very first day of principal photography and the very first shot by either myself or Chris as these characters, looking up at Laufey, who’s the king of the Frost Giants. It was just the first moment these characters existed.
It’s weirdly unforgettable. He was wearing the red cape and holding the hammer. He said something like, “Know your place, brother.” It just felt like we’d started something.
So that particular shot has a very close place in my heart.

Total Film Issue November

Exclusive: Will we ever get to see The Enchantress?

Is Loki ever going to get it on with the Enchantress?
Ooh!
Is he ever going to get a love interest? Does he have to remain a celibate God?
He certainly is not, though. I mean, Sleipnir is one of his children. Did you know that? Odin’s eight-legged horse in the mythology is one of Loki’s children. As is Fenrir the wolf.
Right, so he likes animals. He’s into bestiality…
Yep. I don’t know (laughs). When I was first reading the comics, the relationship with the Enchantress was one of the really fun things I thought would be good to explore, and may have even pitched it to Kevin Feige at some point. Because she is as sneaky and as untrustworthy as he was.
They basically had a really fantastic and twisted relationship until they both say, “You know what? I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you. It’s over.” Because they keep betraying each other, in a way. So it could be good.

Is there any likelihood of him turning up in another Iron Man or in a Captain America?
I really don’t know. I wish I could say. I think it would be hilarious, but I don’t know. Wouldn’t it?
Thor: The Dark World opens in the UK on 30 October 2013.
For much more from Hiddleston, Christopher Eccleston, Chris Hemsworth, Alan Taylor and many more, pick up the brand-new issue 212 of Total Film magazine, which is out 27 September 2013.

Controverse Pictures

So I know that this Pictures were taken from his facebook account, it has been closed for some time now, and I don´t think its wrong to show this pictures - but I don´t share them on tumblr or facebook, I´ll just put them here...because rude or not - they are outthere and for veryone looking to find.

...but on the other hand - it doesn´t feel right, because he is a gentle person so we can figure he wouldn´t be mad about it, but is it right? You know what - I won´t do it at the end...nope.

Thor: The Dark World Feature - Cinemania Magazine (Spain) October 2013

Cinemania

Update Coriolanus

Coriolanus LIVE NTL Trailer

NTL tweeted about a surprise yesterday and we got  a little candy for our eyes by a little speech of Tom Hiddleston himself about Coriolanus.

Elle exclusive about Thor and the Slap

Also another article by Elle UK

PBS is now showing The Hollow Crown in the US.

Richard II

Tom will attend to the BFI London Film Festival

BFI

Thor the Dark Kingdom Premier

The Dark Kingdom Premier in Berlin will be on a Sunday the 27th October to be exact. A few girls already made their commitment for being all together on the road. Hotels and Hostels are bokked already.

But for me I think it won´t be - as much and crazy in love I am, I don´t have the money and more than to stand in rain and coldness to see him walk pass me for a few minutes - I´d rather drive in the next big City and watch the Movie in Orginal language.

Cause I also want to give myself a gift of travelling to London in March on my birthday. I should really safe it, for I don´t have a lot to spent. Well right now at least.

Ahh, how I wished I could go and go a bit crazy with these girls. But well, can´t change the fact that I am poor like some mice from the church. I will simply enjoy the pictures that will come fly by.

Tom photographed by the Barbershop Owner - at one of the oldest and most traditionallst Barbershops of London Pall Mall Barbers

Tom Hiddleston Live Chat 13.9.13

http://hiddlesadmirer.tumblr.com/post/61064167815

Only Lovers left alive

It´s just that this haunts me - I almost cried hearing this for the first time.

Tom at the TIFF in Canada

Amazing as it is - Tom is at the Toronto Filmfestival right now. But it's not only him. 

Along with him there are: Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassbender and Chris Hemsworth. I hope they have a chance to meet up, when they are finally joining the same Festival. Ben and Tom where both there on Friday. Ben's Film opened the Festival.

Sadly Tilda Swinton couldn't be there. But she send greetings through Tom. He really seems to have fun thou because he started tweeting again- he seems to have a bit more time for himself finally. Cause if he is busy, he doesn´t tweet quite as much. And so we finally got our Song of the day back :-))))

A really peaceful and rythmn sound is to it. I really wonder where he finds such music. 

This one is so dreamy. 

By the way I keep the running up. As I see Tom also.

Keep going

Well, today was the first time I was like - God why am I doing this ... maybe I can let it out for a night - but I won´t start with this cause tomorrow night you´ll also not want to stand up at 3:30 to go jogging. I know it. It´s difficult for I am not the sporty type. And I like to sleep long also. But I started it and I plan to do it until 31 October at least. Not any less. And maybe there will come a time I´ll like to stand up and excersise - God I really hope so :-)