And in my first year at Cambridge I was in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire playing Mitch, the Karl Malden part, and an agent and a casting director came to see it and they signed me up. I started at Cambridge University, world famous for its production of directors and actors, of all kinds, and comedians and I knew there was a scene for that and the first thing I did was I found the acting community and got myself involved. And, literally, on the heels of finishing in Edinburgh, I went to Cambridge. And it surprised me because I wasn’t particularly reaching for it, it just seemed to come out of me and my family – my sisters and my dad and my mum – all separately came to see it and they said ‘this is a bit different, what you’re doing now this isn’t just showing off, this is communicating something deep and profound and you were amazing in it’. Everybody was impeccably cast and, somehow, without too much effort, we created a very classic production which became a huge hit at that festival. And it was just very well-staged I don’t take responsibility for that. And, Journey’s End itself is an extraordinary play because it’s set in a trench with a group of public school educated officers who have graduated from being captain of the rugby and the cricket team, to being captain of the company, leading a company or a battalion of men across no-man’s-land to fight the Germans. Which our mutual friend, Ken Thompson, was also in. TH: The turning point was when I was 18, I did production of Journey’s End at the Edinburgh Festival. IS: So when did you realise this could possibly be a career and you had that skillset? I think all children and teenagers are movie-lovers, in a way. And, was a cinephile, like everybody else. But your talents, in a way- your natural talents- are starting to emerge and you just lean towards stuff and I just did play after play after play. You might be an amazing footballer or you might be an amazing sprinter or you might be a painter, or you’re really good at drawing or you’re an amazing pianist or singer or something. You know how, as you’re becoming a teenager, you’re starting to become aware of your skillset. I was really sort of caught by around the age of 13. But, so, there was a lot of dressing up and acting and we would do a show at the end of the week for our parents.īut then I started doing it properly, I think, at school. Like, my sister and her kind of age contemporary in that family would write it and me and Matthew would build all the props and I would always play the baddie, incidentally. And then I had other cousins, another set of cousins and when we went to stay with them, we used to stay with them for a week in the summer and we would write, stage and direct a play. I’m going all the way back – I don’t know if any of this is relevant in any way, but I suppose it is. And I remember with my cousins I used two – I had two very shy cousins, and I would go and stay with them and they would say ‘be funny, Tom’ and I would do a little show, for them.
And, my sister – my youngest sister- cut together a reel of footage from 1986 to 1994, which my dad had taken with his old VHS home camera, as they were, or ‘Home Entertainment Systems’ as they were called, I think, and it was really startling how much of a show-off I was as a child and I was always, forever, doing impressions and doing voiceovers of trailers of a family holiday in Canada.
TH: Recently, actually, when I turned 30. TH: Oh my goodness, that’s a huge question. INDUSTRIAL SCRIPTS: So firstly, how early was it in the Hiddleston evolution that you realised you a) wanted to act and b) had some talent in that area?
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