‘I believe in the
strength and
intelligence
and sensitivity
of women. My
mum is a strong
woman and
I love her for it’
Jarmusch project in which he plays Adam, a 500-year-old
vampire rock star with suicidal leanings. ‘Adam is a delicate
soul,’ says Tom. Adam is, indeed, delicate, but he is also
(and this is where Tom’s gift for comedy comes into play)
sweet and entirely useless, a reclusive musician suffering
the despair of being eternal. Think undead My Chemical
Romance fan. He stars opposite Tilda Swinton, who he
says is just like her giddy, optimistic character, Eve. ‘She’s
the most beautiful woman in the world, and it’s seemingly effortless. She’s very, very warm. Tilda and I would be
laughing sometimes and Jim would come in and say [he
adopts a lazy Ohio drawl]: “Taaammmm, you smile
a lot, man. And Adam doesn’t smile so much.”’ He also
loved the purity of the love story. ‘Adam is so deeply flawed,
and depressive, and melancholic. But Eve just loves it,
loves his commitment to it. We were trying to make a film
about acceptance. And true love is an accep- tance of
someone else for who they are.’
So Hiddleston is clever, eloquent, charming, sensi- tive and
earnest. But then there’s that other side, the spontaneous
and silly side, best seen on YouTube, where he has become
an inadvertent sensation due to the fact that ‘I don’t know
what my boundaries are, I just say yes to things’.
That’s how he ended up throwing some serious
shapes on Alan Carr: Chatty Man, which, for the record,
was 1) not planned: ‘I promise I had no idea I was going to
do that’; and 2) the genuine Hiddleston disco expe- rience:
‘If you asked me to dance now, it would be the same moves.
That’s my dance.’ He can also be seen sing- ing Michael
Jackson’s Man In The Mirror on Korean TV, because the
talk show host asked him which part of his body he had
most confidence in and he said his voice. (And, yes, he
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