Tom Hiddleston auditioned to play Thor and was cast as Loki instead
Tom Hiddleston bulked up by twenty pounds of muscle in six weeks to try out for Thor, because a tall, blond, classically trained actor seemed to fit the mould. Director Kenneth Branagh decided he made a better villain. Loki turned the Cambridge classicist into a global star and has followed him through seven films.
Hiddleston was born in Westminster, London, on 9 February 1981. His mother was an arts administrator and former stage manager from Suffolk; his father, from Greenock in Scotland, was a physical chemist who ran a biotechnology firm. He boarded at Eton from thirteen, the year after his parents divorced, then read Classics at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where Mary Beard was among his supervisors and he took a double first. An agent spotted him in a student Streetcar Named Desire, and he finished training at RADA in 2005.
The stage built his reputation before the screen did. His West End Cymbeline in 2007 won him the Olivier Award for Best Newcomer, and he played Cassio in a Donmar Othello and appeared with Branagh in Chekhov's Ivanov. That connection mattered: having worked together on Ivanov and the detective series Wallander, Branagh invited him to audition for Thor and persuaded Marvel's executives to trust him. Hiddleston has said Branagh gave him his break.
The year 2011 was crowded. Besides Loki, he appeared as F. Scott Fitzgerald for Woody Allen in Midnight in Paris, plus a cavalry officer in Spielberg's War Horse. He kept choosing auteur projects, including Jim Jarmusch's vampire story Only Lovers Left Alive and Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak, where he took over from Benedict Cumberbatch. For the Hank Williams biopic I Saw the Light he prepared for nearly five weeks and sang seven songs himself; the film fared poorly, but critics praised him.
Television gave him his biggest awards. As Jonathan Pine in The Night Manager, adapted from John le Carré, he won a Golden Globe for Best Actor and two Emmy nominations. Kong: Skull Island took over 566 million dollars in 2017. On stage he played Coriolanus at the Donmar in 2013 and 2014, and he reached Broadway in 2019 with Pinter's Betrayal, which brought a Tony nomination.
Source: Tom Hiddleston
