Kenneth Branagh is said to have remarked that 2008 has been Tom Hiddleston's year. He should know: he has had a double helping. First in the sell-out production of Ivanov where Hiddleston was brilliant, alongside Branagh, as Lvov, the irritating doctor. And then again in Wallander, the three-part BBC series, where Hiddleston played a junior detective. This role involved a persistent, energetically suppressed reluctance to do the menial detective duties assigned to him. And watching Hiddleston react to Branagh's gloomy Swedish inspector was a pleasure in itself: he has an exceptionally expressive, often quizzical, face - even his eyebrows are capable of looking aspirational.
Tom is tall, fair and handsome - engaging and engaged (with his career). When I met him, I suggested that both roles, detective and doctor, involve being frustrated. And I wondered whether there might be a parallel with his situation as an actor - the longing for the defining role? He is far too smart to deny his appetite for work. But he points out that there has been more to his career than these keen wannabes. It was his performances as Cassio in Othello at the Donmar and Posthumous in a Cheek by Jowl Cymbeline that gave him the greatest thrill - and he would love to do more Shakespeare. This year, he also shone as a cocksure Etonian in Joanna Hogg's acclaimed debut film, Unrelated.
He was born in London. Aged seven, his family moved to a Cotswold village and when he was 12, his parents divorced. He went on to read classics at Cambridge rather than the nearby Oxford - partly, he says lightly, to dodge any difficulty about which parent to go to for Sunday lunch.
Before he got to Cambridge, he took part in an amateur production of Journey's End that went to the Edinburgh festival and won five stars from the Scotsman. "It was a life-changer to be involved in that show," he says. Soon afterwards, he was spotted by casting agent Gilly Poole in an undergraduate production of A Streetcar Named Desire and, by 2000, had talked his tutors into allowing him to miss most of his second term to act in a film of Nicholas Nickleby
His greatest fault as an actor is trying to do too much - on screen, in particular, he has had to learn to "do less". But I have the feeling that "doing less" will continue to be a challenge.
