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As swirling ash blacks out the sun over the doomed city of Pompeii during the 79 AD eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, actor Tom Hiddleston holds a phone flashlight aloft to illuminate a teen blacksmith’s apprentice trying to find and save his mother in the chaos.
It’s one of the occasional surreal moments in this three-part docudrama, Pompeii: Out of Time, about the last hours of the Roman metropolis. Hiddleston, most famous for playing the clever storytelling god Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, appears as his contemporary self in some of the cinematic reenactments. They feature the separate stories of three real people: that searching young man, Avianius; a powerful independent businesswoman, Julia Felix; and a Praetorian Guard soldier. To reconstruct their fateful choices, Hiddleston consults with archaeologists, historians, geologists, and disaster experts.
“I wanted to find a narrative structure where I could communicate what I feel when I’m in Pompeii,” says Hiddleston, who returned for the first time since he became entranced with the city as a 17-year-old. “The 2000 years between my reality and their reality collapses instantaneously because Pompeii has been so perfectly preserved — the bread they were baking, the playgrounds they played in, the houses they lived in. It feels like yesterday.”
Hiddleston wanted to humanize the disaster and does it by being as expert a storyteller as Loki. He and the team pore over ancient records, walk the streets of Pompeii, and examine artifacts — including a necklace one subject may have worn on the day.
You’ll be invested in their stories, but be warned, not all survive. However, Hiddleston takes comfort in what has lasted, “You’re looking back to our origins in Western civilization — our politics, culture, theater, architecture, philosophy — the foundations of how we live now.”
We spoke with the actor about what it was like behind the scenes, his teen adventures in Pompeii, and how playing Loki changed his view of storytelling.
Can we conduct the entire interview in Latin? Your Latin’s pretty good in the show.
Tom Hiddleston: You’re going to test me, but if we must. My Latin’s okay. It’s a little rusty. It’s sadly not a living language. You can’t go to Rome and practice. I can pop to Paris and brush up on the old French, but Latin’s gone. Never coming back, I don’t think.
You did get to go back in time in some of the scenes. What was it like shooting those?
Can I say incredibly thrilling? Pompeii had, with extraordinary generosity, given us permission to film in the site after dark. We were a small production unit of 10 people in this enormous town, and there’s nobody else, no streetlights. It was very dark, and you can see the shadow of Vesuvius. Myself, the camera operator, the first AD, the sound recorders, and the director took off on a high-speed chase through the alleyways and streets lit by only the moon and the stars. I’m looking for Avianius after the eruption of Vesuvius has eclipsed the light of the sun.
That sequence is almost a recreation of the historical process, which is to go into the past and shine a light on things that we don’t know about. It felt like we were inventing a new way of storytelling where there was this very fine liminal threshold between the past and the present. I could somehow use the light from my phone, and it would penetrate through time. We feel for these people as if it happened yesterday, the impossibility of their decisions.
You had a scene with each character where you made eye contact across time. Why did you want to include those shared looks?
To walk around Pompeii is to feel time collapse. It was 2,000 years ago, but it feels like yesterday. Looking across time at individual ordinary people was a way of expressing that distance and nearness simultaneously. The intimate relationship with the past is something I find reassuring. You can look into the eyes of others and connect with them as fellow human beings.
Did you connect the most with Avianias, Julia Felix, or the Pretorian?
It’s hard to pick one because I feel I got to know all three of them so intimately, and I studied them so carefully. In the course of the show, I speak to different experts, and they helped me redraft my imagined reality of their lives. I felt by the end that they were my friends, like family. I connected with Avianius because he was almost the same age as I was when I first went to Pompeii. Avianis was about 14, and I was 17. Julia Felix was extraordinary. When I was eventually shown the necklace that she was wearing, it was like meeting her. The Pretorian I found incredibly moving. I saw the remains of all those bodies in the boatyards and started to imagine his courage and his sacrifice.
You say they became friends. Do you still think about them?
All the time. I think the magic of being alive is that the things that take our curiosity and interest, they become objects that are very alive in the mind. Just because the project is over doesn’t mean that they’re not still very vivid.
What was it like to return to Pompeii for the first time since your teenage trip?
I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that my own youth feels very close but also very far away. A lot has happened since then, and yet I feel internally I’m the same person. I felt a lot of pride in my younger self for the courage to go to Italy on my own with two friends at that age. I really was a boy. It’s a very alive time in anyone’s life to be 17, and it was a golden time for me. I remember the smells, the music. It was the summer of 1998. We used to watch World Cup matches in the youth hostels, in the corner pizzerias. We didn’t have money. We were eating and sleeping on a budget, but it was an adventure. We climbed Vesuvius not really knowing what to expect, not knowing if we had the right shoes, but there was something about the innocence of youth and the courage of doing crazy things. It was also moving to go back to my first love, my passion for the classics and the ancient world. It felt like reconnecting with a part of myself that I haven’t been able to access for a while.
Did playing Loki, the god of stories, make you more interested in looking at narratives in new ways?
Certainly. The experience of making Loki, and specifically Season 2, was life-changing. I had a thrilling experience on that particular season, thinking about story, thinking about time. The great theme of the whole show across 12 episodes is time — how we quantify it, qualify it, give it value, how we use it, how we waste it, how much we have, how we indulge it. Whether it’s linear or circular, our awareness of time, both its finite and infinite quality, the idea of possibility, what it means to have choices. You can get lost in this stuff, but it’s very invigorating. In the conclusion of that series, Loki — who in previous stories has been self-absorbed, traumatized, and hamstrung by his own great reservoirs of personal pain — comes to understand that to have the glorious purpose that he’s always dreamed of, [he must] make a sacrifice. He uses his power as a deity so that other stories can be told. He stands in a place of provision and responsibility to save other people, to preserve as much for them as possible, a very selfless and powerful choice.
The way we told that story has made me think about the nature of storytelling in a different way. We can be agile. Stories don’t have to be linear. You can fast forward and rewind and have different dimensions, which more closely mirrors the experience of being alive.
Well, thank you so much for speaking with me. Gratias is all the Latin I can come up with.
Gratias tibi ago.
Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston, Series Premiere, July 22, 9/8c, National Geographic
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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