Tom Hiddleston

Thomas William "Tom" Hiddleston

9 February 1981


An English actor. He attended the Dragon School preparatory school in Oxford, and by the time he was 13, he boarded at Eton College. Hiddleston continued on to Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge, where he earned a double first in Classics. During his second term at Cambridge he was seen in a production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" by talent agent Lorraine Hamilton, of Hamilton Hodell. He proceeded to study acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, from which he graduated in 2005.

Hiddleston was one of the celebrities to design and sign his own card for the UK-based charity "Thomas Coram Foundation for Children". The campaign was launched by crafting company Stampin’ Up! UK and the cards were auctioned off on eBay during May 2014. Hiddleston is also a supporter of the humanitarian and developmental assistance fund group UNICEF. He traveled to Guinea in early 2013 to help woman and children and raise awareness about hunger and malnutrition.

Tom Hiddleston won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Newcomer in a Play for his role in Cymbeline while also being nominated for the same award the same year for his role of Cassio in "Othello". In 2011 he won the Empire Award for Best Male Newcomer and nominated for the BAFTA Rising Star Award for his role in "Thor". He won the MTV Movie Award for Best Fight and Best Villain in 2013 for his role in "The Avengers". For his role in the 2013 play "Coriolanus", he won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actor.

As actor

• The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (2001)
• Conspiracy (2001)
• The Gathering Storm (2002)
• A Waste of Shame (2005)
• Unrelated (2006)
• Miss Austen Regrets (2008)
• Archipelago (2010)
• Thor (2011)
• Midnight in Paris (2011)
• War Horse (2011)
• Friend Request Pending (2011)
• The Deep Blue Sea (2012)
• Out of Time (2012)
• The Avengers (2012)
• Out of Darkness (2012)
• Henry IV Part I and Part II (2012)
• Henry V (2012)
• Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
• Exhibition (2013)
• Family Guy (2013)
• Thor: The Dark World (2013)
• Muppets Most Wanted (2014)
• Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)
• The Pirate Fairy (2014)
• Unity (2015)
• Crimson Peak (2015)
• High Rise (2015)
• I Saw the Light (2015)
• The Night Manager (2016)
• Kong: Skull Island (2017)
• Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
• Early Man (2018)

Quotations

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Haters never win. I just think that's true about life, because negative energy always costs in the end.

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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.

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Never stop. Never stop fighting. Never stop dreaming.

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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.

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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.

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In our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out.

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When people don't like themselves very much, they have to make up for it. The classic bully was actually a victim first.

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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.

* * *

You look at the greatest villains in human history, the fascists, the autocrats, they all wanted people to kneel before them because they don't love themselves enough.

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I did a production of 'Journey's End,' an RC Sherriff play about World War I, at the Edinburgh Festival. I was 18 and it was the first time that people I knew and loved and respected came up to me after the show and said, 'You know, you could really do this if you wanted to.'

* * *

Loki in 'Thor' is the most incredible springboard into a sort of excavation of the darker aspects of human nature. So that was thrilling, coming back knowing that I'd built the boat and now I could set sail into choppier waters.

* * *

If the Loki in 'Thor' was about a spiritual confusion - 'Who am I? How do I belong in this world?' - the Loki in 'Avengers' is, 'I know exactly who I am, and I'm going to make this world belong to me.'

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I think we all see ourselves as the heroes in our own lives.

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Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.

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I don't think anyone, until their soul leaves their body, is past the point of no return.

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Heath Ledger's performance in 'The Dark Knight' quite simply changed the game. He raised the bar not just for actors in superhero films, but young actors everywhere; for me. His performance was dark, anarchic, dizzying, free, and totally, thrillingly, dangerous.

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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?'

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The dream is to keep surprising yourself, never mind the audience.

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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.

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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.

* * *

I never like to make plans. It's nice to just hang.

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With any role, you're extending yourself and acting out things that never happened to you.

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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?'

* * *

Actors do tend to get pigeonholed. People want to know who you are so they can put you in a box. It's lovely to be known for such diametrically opposite roles.

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Tony Stark in 'Iron Man' helped wider audiences finally embrace the enormous talent of Robert Downey Jr.

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It's like playing tennis, you play a different rally with different people. Every actor is different and the chemistry between actors is different.

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I'm an eternal realist and the success rate for being an actor is pretty low.

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It sounds cliched, but superheroes can be lonely, vain, arrogant and proud. Often they overcome these human frailties for the greater good.

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The thing about playing gods, whether you're playing Thor and Loki or Greco Roman gods or Indian gods or characters in any mythology, the reason that gods were invented was because they were basically larger versions of ourselves.

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I thought theater people wouldn't see me if I hadn't trained. I didn't want to just be the Brideshead guy, to spend the rest of my life wearing waistcoats. I got the chance to try everything. Not just Romeos, but pimps and grandfathers and even one role as a woman in a Naomi Wallace play called Slaughter City.

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Some of the greatest actors have turned superheroes into a serious business: Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson in 'Batman'; Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, the first venerable knights of the X-Men, who have now passed the baton to Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy.

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I've done my share of period stuff. I'm not sure why, but people say I have a period face. The bread and butter of British TV is Jane Austen adaptations and bridges and bonnets and boats and horses.

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