If you want the British actor who best embodies fragile, gilded youth, Tom Hiddleston's your man, boy, whatever. His speciality is the young, the green, the dying; dreamers and schemers; the callow buck sent off on a mission that may prove to be his last. Over the past year he's been sent over the top in the first world war, survived the Battle of Britain in the second and drunk himself sick in the bars of 1920s Paris. He made five films back-to-back, then collapsed in bed last Christmas Eve, his health in tatters, the "walking dead" for the next two weeks. His breakthrough season almost broke him, too.
On screen, Hiddleston's willowy alter egos come geared for hard choices and difficult ground. Off screen, it seems, he has bounced back like a rubber ball. I meet him in the garden of a house in west London, where he's eating eggs to keep up his strength. With his hair backcombed, his leather jacket unzipped and a pair of sunglasses hooked casually into the V of his T-shirt, he looks every inch the successful young movie star. It's a little disconcerting to see him out of period clothes.
I'm about to start quizzing Hiddleston on his expanding CV when he helpfully runs me through the list himself. Well, he says, it all started in the autumn of 2009. He played pensive, self-questioning Edward in Archipelago for his friend and mentor Joanna Hogg. Then he worked with Kenneth Branagh on the comic-book blockbuster Thor (in which he starred as the vulpine Loki) and cropped up as boozy, convivial F Scott Fitzgerald in Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris. In Steven Spielberg's forthcoming War Horse, he plays imperilled Captain Nicholls, taking the fight to the Germans across the churned earth of no man's land. He name-checks each director with the excited air of a child who can't quite believe his luck.
The Deep Blue Sea, a pleasingly pungent, smoky adaptation of the Terence Rattigan play, casts him as Freddie Page, the feckless charmer who begins an affair with lonely, married Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz). The film plays out in a cramped and straitened postwar London, roaming the pubs and boarding houses of Islington, though for Freddie it's forever 1940, the year he found his purpose. "I fought in the Battle of Britain, old fruit," he gabbles to Hester. "It was childish people like me who saved us from invasion."
Hiddleston explains that this was the key to playing the man: the sense of a life already lived, a golden moment gone before. "He's suffering from post-traumatic stress; all his friends are dead. And if you survive that experience – the blitz, the Battle of Britain – then all you want to do is drink and sing. Play golf all day and drive 90mph down the Great Western Road. Freddie has this amazing, superficial vitality, but underneath that is a kind of great spiritual desolation."
The Deep Blue Sea is directed by Terence Davies, the uncompromising Liverpudlian behind the peerless Distant Voices, Still Lives, a bruising, semi-autobiographical portrait of working-class family life. Before shooting began, Davies invited the cast out to celebrate his 64th birthday. They went to see Max Ophuls's 1940s romance Letter From An Unknown Woman, then repaired to a nearby pub, where Davies stood up, recited a sonnet and earnestly informed them that they were about to make a film about love and that this was the main thing to keep in mind: that it was first and foremost a film about love. Hiddleston smiles at the memory. "I mean, that's Terence, He's different from Spielberg."
No kidding. One of them is arguably the most successful director who ever lived and the other can barely get himself arrested (The Deep Blue Sea is actually Davies's first feature film in more than a decade). "Yeah, well, I suppose Spielberg's more of a classic storyteller," Hiddleston concedes. "That probably helps. People say he's too sentimental, but he fully believes in all the themes that run through his work. Family, hope, courage, magic. And on set he's like a 25-year-old. He has this infectious, childlike energy. He cries easily. Mind you," he adds, "Terence cries easily, too."
When Hiddleston first started jumping around between the art-house and the blockbuster, he assumed the working methods would be poles apart. In fact, he says, all these directors have more in common than one might assume. Yes, Joanna Hogg likes her actors to improvise their roles, but there's been room for that in the other productions as well. Spielberg insisted the performers feel free to alert him if a line felt wrong to them. Woody Allen, on the set of Midnight In Paris, would sometimes idly instruct his actors to come into a room and "say something". Hiddleston laughs. "I'd say, 'What, you want me to improvise?' And he'd say, 'Yeah, yeah – and maybe make it funny.'"
What's with all the period roles? "I don't know. It's possibly something to do with British cinema. If you look at the best and the worst stuff we've produced recently, it's all set in the past – Tinker, Tailor, The King's Speech. Somehow the past is a safe place to explore our collective cultural neuroses or whatever it is." He studies his eggs. "But it's probably to do with me as well. I wonder if it has something to do with what people perceive as my class or my education or my physique. I suppose I fill a slot."
His background does sound rather princely. Hiddleston was born in February 1981 to an affluent, middle-class family (his dad ran a biotech company that liaised with Oxford University). He was educated at Eton and went on to scoop a double first at Cambridge where he acted alongside the likes of Eddie Redmayne and Rebecca Hall. All this is true, he admits, though it's not the whole story. Instead, the actor describes himself as "a strange hybrid", pointing out that his paternal grandfather was of solid working-class stock, toiling away in the shipyards in Greenock before moving down to Sunderland. Hiddleston remembers childhood visits to his grandad's bungalow and evenings at the Waverley pub, where they'd watch the football and throw some darts.
"When I went up for his 90th birthday in 2002, he was surrounded by all these old men in their early 70s. They were in a bowls team together. Grandad had his own chair – his own chair at the Waverley – and he got very drunk." He laughs. "I'd just left Cambridge and had my first proper acting job, making The Gathering Storm with Albert Finney. It was a complete culture clash. I must have looked like a complete prick. But they were all very nice about it. Grandad said, 'Ach, I never thought I'd have a grandson on the telly.' Then he gave me mint imperials and a £5 note."
After Cambridge he went to Rada. From there he started picking up more TV work in Casualty, Miss Austen Regrets and Wallander, in which he played the fresh-faced sidekick to Branagh's stoic Swedish cop. It was a good apprenticeship and he was earning decent money, even if he did feel there was a glass ceiling hanging somewhere over his head. "I remember shooting the first series of Wallander and on my day off I got the train to Malmö and went to see Iron Man with Robert Downey Jr. And I came out thinking, 'That's so fucking good. But I'm never, in a million years, going to be in a film like that.' But then I tested for the part of Loki in Thor and came away thinking, 'You know, I've got a real chance at this.' It was like a light going on. We all impose limits on ourselves. We think, 'There's the ceiling and that's as far as I can go.' Then something happens and it changes everything."
I'm tempted to cast Joanna Hogg as the catalyst here. It was Hogg, more than anyone, who first spotted Hiddleston's promise. It was she who provided him with his feature debut in her 2008 drama Unrelated, in which he played the pivotal role of Oakley, the footloose, flirtatious young scamp who lures a middle-aged woman towards the rocks. The director and star became friends, and Hogg went on to write her superb second film, Archipelago, with Hiddleston in mind. Here he played the troubled son of a hothouse family, mired in a quarter-life crisis and poised to ditch his job in the City and take off for Africa instead. "Tom has become as much a creative collaborator as an actor in the films," Hogg says. "We sit around and talk a lot, and these very personal conversations have a way of filtering through to the film itself. The thing with Tom is he's able to make you believe in himself. He has this great transformative skill, but he's also putting a lot of himself into every character, and it gives the performance a whole extra layer. Other actors are just interpreting."
It remains to be seen how long he can get away with it; how many ceilings he can bash his head through before he hits the one that's made of stone. Hiddleston suspects that his last, frantic year is going to be impossible to replicate and that he had best enjoy the moment while it lasts, even if it means his girlfriend (actor Susannah Fielding) has to make allowances; even if it means missing his best friend's wedding ("which hurt").
Hogg, for her part, warns that stardom is itself limiting and worries that what's natural and easy about him now could eventually be hampered by all the acclaim. "Sometimes an actor can have too much success," she says. "It's more the fault of the audience than the fault of the actor, but it impairs our sense of them. We start seeing them as an actor as opposed to the character they're playing. I don't know how Tom can avoid that, because he's obviously going to get more and more high profile."
Then there is the nagging, ongoing issue of the slot that he fills. Few contemporary British actors can equal Hiddleston's brand of guileless, old-school grace; that combination of sunny optimism and clouded vulnerability. Small wonder producers want to cast him into the past, installing him as an emblem of the lost generation, fated to be sent off to war, pickle his promise in gin or preside over the sweet, sad decline of the landed gentry.
Out in the garden, the eggs are consumed and we've moved on to biscuits. In the meantime, he's still chewing over my earlier question. "Joanna warned me about this when we first made Unrelated," he recalls. "She said, 'It's going to be very easy to put you in period stuff.' And obviously she's right. When a casting director sees a Cambridge graduate who's tall, well-spoken, classics degree, they think, 'Put him in a waistcoat and send him out.' But that wasn't the reason I became an actor, to fill that niche. It was because of much more muscular things: In The Name Of The Father, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, The French Connection. It was because of Brando and De Niro. So I've always tried to resist it. I never wanted to be the go-to guy for tails and waistcoats."
He says that he'd love to make more contemporary films, but they just don't come his way. "And maybe that's the real glass ceiling, the limitation that's partly about the industry and partly about me and how I'm perceived. It's so funny, the illusion that any of us have any choice. Unless you're Tom Cruise." He hastens to clarify. "And I'm not Tom Cruise."
The Deep Blue Sea is out in the UK now.
• This article was amended on 28 November 2011 to make clear that Tom Hiddleston is not married.
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