(Credits: Alamy)
Tue 3 March 2026 7:30, UK
Tom Hiddleston has had a career that’s been defined by his work with great artists, ensuring his work stands the test of time.
It’s indicative of what today’s entertainment landscape looks like that, among his many roles, he has become best known for his performance as Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s not a part that he should be ashamed of, as for years, Loki was the only exception to Marvel’s issue of not finding antagonists as compelling as their heroes. However, he is the most mainstream and broad performance that Hiddleston has ever given, and it stands in stark contrast to everything else that he has done.
Hiddleston has become a veteran of the stage and has inhabited some of Shakespeare’s most memorable characters; he’s starred in projects based on the works of authors like Stephen King and John le Carré, and even though a majority of his career has been spent making smaller independent dramas and exquisite period pieces, his role as the half-brother of Chris Hemsworth’s Thor has made him a known entity to younger film fans, who hopefully might be inspired to check out his other work.
Given that he is also an active member of charitable organisations that have taken him all over the world, it should come as no surprise that he is also a fan of international cinema. There are few living filmmakers with as impressive a filmography as the great Michael Haneke, and Hiddleston singled out the director’s 2012 masterpiece Amour as a film that blew him away.
“That film is like a mountain,” he said, “It’s a piece of wisdom that is in the background every day, and Haneke has just shown it, saying, ‘So, you know, this is what you want, this is the intimacy that you’ll be lucky to have when you get to the end of your life’. When I saw it, I couldn’t stop thinking about that film for an entire month. It just made everything else seem so flippant and disposable.”
Haneke is known for having a very cutting, nasty sense of humour that emerges in dark comedies like Funny Games and The Piano Teacher, but Amour is by far the most sensitive and sincere of his entire body of work.
The film starred Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva as an ageing couple who continue to share their love for one another, despite being on the verge of death, and although Haneke had never been truly represented by awards bodies, as his work tends to be quite controversial, Amour earned him nominations for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, and ‘Best Original Screenplay’, and even won Austria the prize for ‘Best International Feature’.
Amour was released the same year as The Avengers, the film in which Hiddleston reprised his role as Loki on a much broader scale, and the film’s groundbreaking financial success ensured that he wouldn’t have any issues getting smaller projects off the ground, plus, to his credit, he made valiant efforts to emulate the all-consuming emotional power of what Haneke pulled off in his work.
Hiddleston arguably gave the best performance of his entire career in The Life of Chuck, Mike Flanagan’s stirring family drama, in which he played a seemingly ordinary man whose life was told backwards, and like Amour, it focused on the theme that even the most average of people could still be extraordinary.
