Thirty years ago, a teenager traveling abroad without parents for the first time stumbled upon a scene of astonishing destruction.
In Pompeii, when Tom Hiddleston saw the casts of the bodies killed by the explosion of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. C., was not only horrified, but hypnotized, even moved; In the midst of all that death it felt like the past was alive.
“Up until that point, I had existed in books in the classroom, but I felt like I was going back in time, walking into the past,” he said in a recent video interview about “Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston,” his new series that is a hybrid of travelogue, documentary and extensive dramatic reenactments (with a meta twist).
“I was surprised by the quality of the conservation,” he recalled of that visit as a teenager. “You can hear these buildings transmitting the echoes of the lives they contained thanks to the frescoes, mosaics and furniture. You feel how 2,000 years are compressed and collapsed. It's like magic.”
Hiddleston knows a thing or two about magic and time travel. After studying classics at Cambridge, his acting career took him to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the role of Loki, the god of mischief and “he who crosses boundaries.” Loki's cinematic misdeeds get him “removed from the story's timeline,” and in the “Loki” spin-off TV show, he confronts his past as he bounces back and forth in time.
One place where Loki lands is Pompeii. Hiddleston was actually on a set in Atlanta, but there he was speaking Latin and revisiting his own past. “I felt this extraordinary confluence of my passions.”
Tom Hiddleston in a scene from the series, where he talks to experts about Pompeii and how the eruption of Mount Vesuvius developed.
(Christian Black/National Geographic)
Hiddleston had been talking to producer Kevin R. Wright about his fascination with the ancient world, and after seeing Hiddleston in the fictional Pompeii, Wright launched “Out of Time,” co-writing and helping produce the series, which premieres Wednesday on NatGeo and Thursday on Hulu and Disney+.
In the show, Hiddleston travels back to Pompeii and the lip of the volcano, speaking to experts on Pompeii's history and volcanoes, but also surviving disaster experts, to help him understand people's behavior as the sky fell on them. “It's about trying to gather as much evidence as possible from different disciplines,” he explained.
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Here, for example, is part of his answer to my first question about whether the driving force of the series was the importance of facts in understanding history, the use of storytelling and imagination to create empathy for the people of Pompeii or to show how our past still has lessons to offer today:
“I wanted a series with an original dynamism, that could be immersive, propulsive and emotional, and that would revive the history of Pompeii and its people in a way that could be different and innovative. I wanted to evoke for the audience the feeling I had when I first went to Pompeii.
“In college, I had professors who taught me to live in the question and that our relationship with the past is a two-way street. One cannot examine the past without recognizing that we look back from the perspective of where we are. We tell stories to understand something about ourselves; we need to know who we were to think about who we are now.
Darius Arya, archaeologist and historian, with Hiddleston in the ancient city of Herculaneum. (Paolo Verzone/National Geographic)
Human remains inside boathouses, where people took shelter from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. (Paolo Verzone/National Geographic)
“The driving force of my engagement was centered on empathy, trying to honor the lives of the people of Pompeii. If we could gather enough evidence, enough fragments of truth, they could add up to a picture of the story, which would generate great reserves of feeling and compassion so that we could see ourselves in their situation, their instincts, their choices, their ability to help each other. And that experience of empathy and compassion would connect us to a thread through time with the people who experience a terrifying and traumatic event, and to see it in our world now.
“But we were very careful about the idea that truth matters. In writing history, there must be intense rigor: evidence is important, and if you have evidence, that must counteract any bias or hypotheses.
“But the evidence here is incomplete, so at some point you have to make an educated guess, a leap of imagination. The past is a two-way street with the present, but it is also an eternal mystery and all our questions will never be answered, so in the question is the joy of living.”
When the publicist said we were out of time, Hiddleston went out of time and answered one more question. And then another and another, almost doubling the allotted time, excited to explore the connections between past and present.
While many people think the city's population was wiped out, the vast majority actually escaped and modern research has found the names and details of hundreds of survivors. Hiddleston notes that “a great gift of Pompeii is that the Romans had no paper, so the walls, columns, houses and public buildings are covered in writing: deeds, business contracts, advertisements, gossip, scribbles.”
In this behind-the-scenes photo, cinematographer Jim Jolliffe runs around with a camera, following Frankie Treadaway playing Avianius, a teenager whose story is recreated in the series.
(Darrin Zammit Lupi/National Geographic)
The three episodes follow the stories of a teenager, a successful businesswoman and a soldier in the nearby city of Herculaneum, with an extensive cast and special effects bringing those scenes to life. “We thought that, in the words of Pliny the Younger, 'their lives were worthy of our memory.'”
While there have been other more traditional Pompeii documentaries, Hiddleston felt he had something distinctive to offer, thanks to his “day job.”
“I take a piece of writing and a character, real or imaginary, and I research everything I can, then I imagine it and try to bring a person to life,” he says. “Even when I've played real people, I've run out of evidence. That's when you just have to expand your empathy and compassion, your knowledge of human beings and the breadth and variety of the human experience, the things we all share and can connect with, to find an inner world of variety and depth.”
Hiddleston wanted to extend that to the town of Pompeii. “They were three-dimensional people with rich lives,” he says. “We follow the crumbs as much as possible and then try to bring them to life with empathy and compassion.”
