This week I am just going to do some quotes, from Tom Hiddleston. I think it is a nice way to start a Sunday.
I grew up watching ‘Superman.’ As a child, when I first learned to dive into a swimming pool, I wasn’t diving, I was flying, like Superman. I used to dream of rescuing a girl I had a crush on from a playground bully.
Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama; fathers and sons, martyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings – stories that taught us of the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility.
Haters never win. I just think that’s true about life, because negative energy always costs in the end.
Showing young children in these communities, that there are outlets for their feelings, that there is room in a space for their stories to be told, and that they will be applauded – and it’s not about ego, it’s about connection: that their pain is everybody else’s pain.
My father and I used to tussle about me becoming an actor. He’s from strong, Presbyterian Scottish working-class stock, and he used to sit me down and say, ‘You know, 99 percent of actors are out of work. You’ve been educated, so why do you want to spend your life pretending to be someone else when you could be your own man?’
I don’t think anyone, until their soul leaves their body, is past the point of no return.
For myself, for a long time… maybe I felt inauthentic or something, I felt like my voice wasn’t worth hearing, and I think everyone’s voice is worth hearing. So if you’ve got something to say, say it from the rooftops.
I was so lucky because what I did in ‘Thor’ was I built the character from the ground up – the foundations of his spirit, really. He was someone who was born with an expectation that he would one day be a king, born with an entitlement.
Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other’s, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.
I always found the extraordinary loss of life in the First World War very moving. I remember learning about it as a very young child, as an eight- or nine-year-old, asking my teachers what poppies were for. Every year the teachers would suddenly wear these red paper flowers in their lapels, and I would say ‘What does that mean?’
I’m an eternal realist and the success rate for being an actor is pretty low.
If you are at a boys’ school, especially, there is a level of bravado that you have to keep up otherwise you’ll get picked on.
Since my education, I’ve done quite untraditional things. There are very few Etonians who went to Rada. And far fewer Etonians – certainly when I was there – went to Cambridge. I don’t know whether it’s the same now. Most people I knew went to Oxford, because it seemed more of an easy bridge.
