The Journal Meets... The Deep Blue Sea star Tom Hiddleston
This summer he fought superheroes on a rainbow bridge as the villain in Thor, but this week British actor Tom Hiddleston takes on a postwar drama in The Deep Blue Sea.
Rachel Weisz stars as Hester, a woman in 1951 London who has left her kind, but repressed older husband for a young, charismatic, but thoughtless fighter pilot named Freddie (Hiddleston). As the fractious relationship continues, Hester begin to realise that she has fallen for someone who cannot love her back.
“It’s a film about the complexity of being in love, and the darker side of passion,” said Tom. “Hester’s act of leaving William, a man who is intensely kind, compassionate and gentle, for a man who has passion, but a greater capacity for cruelty, is something that happens every single day, whether it’s 1951 or 2011.”
Although his character could be construed as lacking in emotion, Hiddleston believes it is the experiences of both characters that makes his and Weisz’s roles so different. “I think the reason the relationship between Hester and Freddie can’t work is because Hester is on the run from something incredibly repressed,” he said.
“Freddie has spent five years fighting dogfights in the skies of London, and he has seen death every day. The pot luck of seeing his friends shot out of the sky - so in 1950, all those guys who got back home wanted to do was to live - to sing in the pub, to play golf, to drive fast, simply because they felt so lucky to be alive.”
The actor has had tremendous success recently in both theatre and film. Given that he is starring in a film based on a play, does he think appearing on the silver screen differs from treading the boards?
“I think the cinema differs from the theatre in its capacity to hold silence,” he replies. “I think on stage in a theatre you can’t be silent for too long, because in that silence the play will die, and theatre is an art form that thrives on words, on argument, and cinema is about behaviour, and feeling, and thought, and the expression of thought and feeling without words is, as in life, incredibly moving.”
Read James’ review column At The Movies every week at oxfordjournal.co.uk
