torrilla:

Tom Hiddleston Explains How He Became A Shakespearean, Rocker Vampire

The British actor joins up with director Jim Jarmusch and actor Anton Yelchin to talk about their very un-Twilight movie Only Lovers Left Alive, and why he fell in love with Detroit.posted on September 7, 2013 at 1:45pm EDT

Jordan Zakarin

BuzzFeed Staff

TORONTO — Fun fact: Tom Hiddleston can recite Hamlet on demand.

The formally-trained British actor, 32, has long been enthralled — and in the debt of — Shakespeare. Yes, he recently starred in The Hollow Crown, a production that stitches together four Bard-penned plays for PBS, but he’ll also tell you that he reached deep into The Globe Theater’s greatest hits to inform his performance as the evil god Loki of the Marvel universe; and, he borrowed just as heavily when shaping the character of Adam, a brilliant romantic poet and musician that is suffering through eternity as a vampire in Jim Jarmusch’s new film, Only Lovers Left Alive.

The film, which debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a pitch black comedy that centers on Hiddleston’s Adam — a dark, tortured, and morosely funny blend of Lord Byron and early British goth rockers — and Tilda Swinton’s Eve, a brilliant and sunny vampire who is his devoted, long-distance lover. Twilight, it is not; they drink real human blood and find their angst in the centuries of human potential they’ve seen wasted.

“Hamlet was a big inspiration because he is a doubtful, melancholic, sad sort,” Hiddleston said. “It’s amazing; when I was filling myself up with Adam, I went back and read Hamlet, and so much of Shakespeare’s poetry seemed to speak to me in a way I’d never reconsidered… All of his plays are a constant source of inspiration for me.”

And then, he provided proof, reciting a series of lines from the play that he found particularly helpful and had at the ready to plug into scenes upon Jarmusch’s request.

“How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world!” Hiddleston began, suddenly finding himself in the midst of an impromptu and understated private performance, firing out two more lines as if from muscle memory. “O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!” he whispered, “I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth.”

It was impressive; its spontaneity made it almost entrancing.

Hiddleston laughed when asked if he had all of Hamlet memorized; Jarmusch deadpanned that he had “only half” committed to memory, which made the actor a tad bashful.

Adam lives in Detroit, a semi-abandoned city portrayed as a haunted, almost magical graveyard, with a local rocker named Ian (Anton Yelchin) his only friend. He puts out music anonymously online — the world’s few remaining vampires must keep their identities secret — and communes with the famous playwright Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), who the movie posits wrote all of Shakespeare’s work.

Yes, Only Lovers Left Alive freely riffs on a well of deeply-considered topics, and in a sit down interview with BuzzFeed on Friday, Hiddleston, Jarmusch, and co-star Anton Yelchin continued that conversation. A potpourri of discussion about classic texts to garage rock to the ghost town of Detroit, the three interviewees found transitions and seams of interest in every word.

There’s been a lot of vampire movies the last few years, and this kind of takes back the genre.

TH: Thanks, that’s lovely of you to say that. I don’t know how this came to be, but when it came to me, it came to me after I’d met Jim. I met him in New York and we sat down and had a cup of tea and he said, “I want to make a film about love, and at the center of it, there’s a man and a woman and they’re refined and sensitive and creative and literate and intelligent and they’re outsiders and they’re in love with each other. They’re the sun and the moon, they’re yin and yang. He’s very dark and she’s very light… Oh, by the way, they’re vampires.”

The vampire thing was his framing of the love story. The vampire framing allows his characters to be immortal, so you can extend this concept, you can suddenly ask the question: If you live forever, what does that do to your commitment?

Were you nervous about making one given how many have been out?

JJ: No, not at all. First of all, this idea was seven years in the making, so it predates Twilight and that stuff, which I haven’t seen — but I’m all for it, because I like the genre. But our film isn’t really a vampire film. It’s a love story with some vampires in it. It’s not a horror film, like, Oh my god!

What made you reach out to these two guys?

JJ: They work cheap [laughter all around]. All you had to do was feed them bananas.

TH: It’s true.

JJ: No, they’re fantastic. Are you kidding? This is like a dream to me. Not only the cast to work with, but they’re such damn nice people, it was such a pleasure. If they were assholes, I’d still want to work with them because they’re fantastic, what they do. And then the good news is, they’re the exact opposite of assholes! It was like being in heaven.

Tom, you’re really the ultimate goth rocker in this movie because you’re actually undead. Did you model the character or look after anyone?

JJ: Well a little Syd Barrett in there.

TH: A little Syd Barrett, yeah.

JJ: Hamlet in there, whatever he might look like. Little things that Tom brought, Tom was very instrumental in his wardrobe. We all collaborated on it with our designer, but Tom had to, he had to okay with all these things. I wanted them to look a certain way, I did have a kind of hair fetish.

TH: We wanted them to look like animals. They had this feral beauty to them, they didn’t look like they were humans. They had hair that might be the hide of a wolf.

JJ: And not Ian, because he’s not a vampire. But Adam, Eve, Ava and Marlowe, their wigs were made up of a mixture of human hair and yak and goat hair mixed in. We wanted it to look not quite human; a little wild and a little strange.

TH: Also with Adam, there was this idea that whenever he was turned into a vampire, it was around the very kind of peak the Romantic movement, that somehow that Byronic — the idea of the Romantic poet, being consumed by it, it was almost like rock n’ roll before rock n’ roll. That’s Adam, the dark, dark spirit.

Do you see yourself in that?

TH: We contain multitudes. If I’m a piano keyboard, those are my black keys, I guess.

How would you spend your time if you had to live forever? It’s almost a punishment.

TH: Or a blessing, if you’re Eve, who takes the long view and rejoices in the small things. My favorite line in the film is one of hers, when she says, “Life is about surviving things, appreciating nature, nurturing kindness and friendship, and balancing.”

JJ: Which she wrote, by the way.

Did you get dialogue input yourselves?

JJ: Oh, always. But I asked them specifically for that scene, where they have this argument or whatever, a conflict. I ask them to write their own speeches and I asked them to make them as long as they wanted and they made them quite long and then we edited them as we shot, and then I edited them down more. But that was the procedure; they wrote those things, and Tom, that’s his line about the zombies being afraid of their own imaginations.

TH: That’s a true statement about the world. From Adam’s perspective, the reason he gets sad is because the human race is so afraid of its imagination.

JJ: There’s a lot of beautiful things that they wrote, it’ll be in the outtakes, where Anton wrote this part about all the bands from Detroit, from The White Stripes-Dirtbombs period, and he jumps up and is all excited about, “It’s gonna come back! Just think of all those bands.” But there are things in the film that he brought, of course; I don’t even know what was written when, and it’s not important. Because filming is about gathering the material that then you’ll make a film out of.

Any lines you were especially proud of?

TH: Sometimes just saying “Fuck” at the right time.

Anton, we don’t know much about Ian. What did you do to figure out the character, for yourself?

AY: I ended up hanging out with a bunch of guys in Detroit that I met at a barbecue. I saw this band, Danny and the Darleans play, and Danny is in the Gories, and I met this one guy named Scott Dunkerly, who I’m really indebted to. Just because the things he talked about, how he felt about Detroit, how he felt about his time and place in Detroit, the fact that he was living in a city that everyone was saying was dying, and he felt that was no way to live and that he felt you can’t live in a city and say it’s dying, you have to bring life to it.

And it made me realize why Ian loves Adam so much, because he’s his light in his life. He meets this man and he’ll do anything for him, because he convinces him that there is something going on, and I felt like it was just incredible that I got to meet Scott and talk with him for a while. He put out a record — he felt all the garage rock in Detroit, people just talk about The White Stripes and that was it, it’s done. So when he was in high school he collected all these bands that he knew. He gave us copies of the record, it’s awesome. In his van he had these CDs, and he was lamenting the fact that no one gives a shit about CDs, he has stacks of them.

I’m indebted to him in understanding what it’s like to be a young guy in the music scene in Detroit. What do you have to look forward to?

JJ: Because he met him and used his research, we brought his essence into the film, with the guy in the club who he gives the All Black records — the guy’s named Scott, and that wasn’t in the script, I wrote it in after he did this research. I met Scott, too, through Anton.

AY: And Scott’s in the movie, he’s one of the rocker kids outside.

So you shot this in Detroit — what’s that like?

TH: I fell in love with the place. It’s kind of America’s lost soul. It’s its aching heart, there’s a line that isn’t the movie anymore, where Adam tries to explain to Eve why he loves it so much. He says, “It’s like watching time lapse photography of a flower, as it grows from a seed and bulbs and blooms and blossoms and then shrivels and fades and dies and turns to dust.” I think Adam finds that really beautiful. Once upon a time it was the center of the world. Henry Ford made his first car, the Packard plant. People emigrated to Detroit for work, and that’s why it became this extraordinary place of cultural diversity and that’s how Motown came about. Rock, and soul, and R&B all kind of blended in, and suddenly you have this movement.

I think it’s the most beautiful city, and it gave me a very different perspective, as an Englishman, of America.

What’d it make you think of America?

TH: Well it made it seem older than I had become accustomed to; it’s such a young nation in the course of the history of the world, and that’s its greatest strength, I think. It really feels like America has such an amazing confidence, which I’ve always felt is really vital and energetic. And places like Europe, where I’m from, it’s older, the buildings are older, it’s rain-soaked and cynical. In America it’s always up and upbeat, but Detroit has a different flavor, and I loved it. I really, really loved it.

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torrilla:

Tom Hiddleston On His Rocker-Vampire in ‘Only Lovers Left Alive,’ ‘Thor 2,’ and ‘Avengers 2’

by Marlow Stern Sep 7, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

After starring as the villain of ‘Thor’ and ‘The Avengers,’ Tom Hiddleston opted to play a sexy rocker-vampire opposite Tilda Swinton in Jim Jarmusch’s vampire love story, ‘Only Lovers Left Alive.’ He sat down with Marlow Stern at TIFF to discuss the movie, his advice for new ‘Avengers’ villain James Spader, and road to stardom.

Tom Hiddleston is nothing if not versatile. He’s tackled Shakespeare, appearing as Cassio in an acclaimed stage version of Othello opposite Chiwetel Ejiofor; portrayed writer F. Scott Fitzgerald in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris; took the role of a kind soldier in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse; and, last but not least, inhabited the villainous Loki in Thor and its upcoming sequel, Thor: The Dark World, as well asThe Avengers, winning Best Villain at the MTV Movie Awards for the latter.

The 32-year-old Brit’s latest role sees him switch gears once more, portraying a tormented, oft-shirtless rocker-vampire in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive. Adam (Hiddleston) is a suicidal vampire living in Detroit, which is now a desolate wasteland, where he produces moody music for his own consumption. His centuries-old lover, Eve (Tilda Swinton), lives out in Tangiers, and has a more positive outlook on the undead life. When Eve pays Adam a visit, his melancholy dissipates.

Hiddleston, a genial fellow, looks mighty dapper in a bespoke three-piece suit. He sat down with The Daily Beast at TIFF to discuss his myriad projects.

Were you like, “OK, I get to play a rocker/vampire. You don’t even need to show me the script. I’m in.”

[Laughs] Honestly, everything. I met Jim Jarmusch in November 2011 and I’d just finished shooting Avengers. I was doing press for War Horse, and was about to startThe Hollow Crown for the BBC and PBS. In this swirl of superheroes and soldiers and Shakespeare, here was one of the great American indie auteurs, and we sat, and he pitched it to me. He said, “This is a love story about two old souls who are refined, sophisticated, delicate, and in danger. They’re very poetic, and it will be you and Tilda Swinton, and you’re a musician and she’s a bohemian… and by the way, you’re vampires.” It was the easiest “yes” in the world. And I’d always wanted to make a love story, because I’ve never made one like this, which is basically a love song.

Much of the film is set in Detroit, which is depicted as this wasteland, which is interesting because Detroit was not bankrupt yet while you were filming. Pretty prescient.

It’s funny when I mention it in the States, because people are like, “Oh, you were in Detroit…,” as if it was some hard thing, but I love it—probably because it was exotic to me. As a city in the United States, it’s about as close as you can get to ancient, in a strange way. It’s like one of those fast-forwarded videos of a flower growing from a seed, blossoming, then fading and dying. That’s what happened to Detroit. But it still has this incredible soul with the music, Motown, Jack White, and Marshall Mathers. Jim has a great affection for Detroit and it rubbed off on me, too.

Had you ever fantasized about being a rock star?

[Laughs] I’m not a good enough musician, honestly. When I was a teenager, I played the guitar and the piano, and played sports, and I acted, but acting was the thing that I kept wanting to do most. But I’ve always loved music. And Jim and I, for months on end, talked about music, his friends Tom Waits and Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger in his early days in Nick Roeg’s Performance…

…Oh, Performance is a fantastic film. Such an interesting social commentary— contrasting the hippie Jagger and the buttoned-up gangster.

That was a big reference point for us—a dilapidated old house, living in it and being bohemian.

Back to all the dabbling as a youngster—why did you choose acting over sports and music?

I think it offered the most complete experience for me to be creative, and probably suited my talents, in a way. Acting, for me, is so many things. I love entertaining, but there’s an intellectual curiosity that I get to satiate there, and there’s a great research element where you’re learning all the time about people, experiences, literature, and art, as well as meeting new people. Acting is a total art form because it doesn’t just demand that you bring your brain to bear on the material, it demands that you bring your body, and your heart, and often your brain can get in the way. I remember a specific time in my early-to-mid teens in a cinema where I believed being an actor was a very noble thing. The actors and directors I was watching showed me different things about the world; about life. Spielberg, Gilliam, Tarantino, Nanni Moretti. When I was a teenager, those were the people making exciting work. I just wanted to be a part of this amazing community of people.

Is it intimidating to work with vampire Tilda Swinton?

She’s not. She is one of the most free-spirited people I’ve ever worked with. There’s a very infectious rebelliousness of spirit about her. She’s not a conventional actress, and never has been, and I don’t think she’s ever wanted to be. It all feels like an extension of herself, or her curiosity, in a way. She had been working on this with Jim for eight years before I came on.

But it must have been a little intimidating to shoot that scene where you two are lying on the bed naked staring at each other. It reminded me of the recent MoMA demonstration she did, where she rested in a transparent box.

Not at all! I remember at the time, she said, “This is who we are… we’re all born this way.” There was no self-consciousness or vanity to it.

Adam and Eve are opposites, but very much in love. Adam is a tortured soul that feels cursed by his “affliction,” while Eve sees the bright side to every situation.

So much of our definition of love, as a human race, is founded upon the rock of the idea of mortality—the idea that we know we’re going to die. So, you want to find someone to share your life with because you know it’s short. But what if your life was not short? What if it was eternal? How would that change the way that you love, and the way that you see and accept your lover?

Adam also looks down on humans, or “zombies,” as he calls them, and the state of humanity makes him sad. How do you feel about the state of the world, and does it make you sad?

It’s a strange world, for sure. We live in a great age, truly. Just the ease with which we travel and connect—so many of us, anyway—and we have such a high standard of living. I love that Louis CK sketch where someone is complaining about the WiFi breaking down on an airplane and he goes, “YOU ARE SITTING ON A CHAIR IN THE SKY! YOU’RE EXPERIENCING THE MIRACLE OF HUMAN FLIGHT!” So in one way, the world is a miracle of invention and imagination. In another way, it would be nice if we could stop fighting each other.

Have you seen the Twilight movies?

I saw the first one, which I enjoyed. I thought it was a really interesting piece about adolescence, and high school, and the eternal position of a teenager feeling on the fringes of life.

Unlike the Twilight kids, you weren’t some young actor who was thrown into a blockbuster and became an instant star. You really worked your way up the ladder. What would you consider your big break?

I did, yeah. There was a production of Othello in London with Chiwetel Ejiofor, who is one of the greatest actors I’ve ever shared a stage with, and that production was, apart from being one of the proudest moments of my career, everyone came to see it and it really dictated the course of the next four years of my life. Kenneth Branagh and Joss Whedon came to see Othello, and those men are pretty much responsible for everything else that happened. I spent a year with Branagh on Ivanov andWallander and Thor, and then Joss wrote me a fantastic part in Avengers. And, from my work with Ken, I did Midnight in Paris and War Horse.

Not every actor can take on such a wide variety of roles, going from Shakespeare to winning MTV Video Movie Awards as a supervillain, to a rocker-vampire.

The thing is: I love so many different types of films. Honestly, four years ago on a Friday night, I went to see The Proposal, the romantic comedy with Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock, which I loved, and on the next night, I went with a different friend to see Antichrist. I couldn’t tell you on Sunday morning which one I enjoyed more. I genuinely enjoyed them both for what they were. I think to have a varied palate is good. It keeps you sharp.

And you’ve got Thor: The Dark World coming out soon.

What’s interesting is it’s a new dynamic. In Thor, I was the antihero who turned into a villain; in Avengers, I’m the out-and-out bad guy; and in Thor: The Dark World, Malekith, played by Christopher Eccleston, is the villain, so I occupy a unique position because I’m sort of an ally.

Are we going to see you pop up in the Avengers sequel?

I don’t think so. I think James Spader’s got that one sewn up.

Did Spader come to you with any questions about Avengers?

No, James Spader doesn’t need my advice! He’s a great actor and he’ll do a wonderful job.

You could just ask him about spanking, or something.

[Laughs] Yeah, I’ll say, “Don’t spank the Hulk!”

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