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.
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 screened 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.
