Lord, I’m really going through Tom Hiddleston withdrawal. I hope he wraps Crimson Peak quickly so he can come back to being our very special dancing bear. He can quote Shakespeare to ducks and he can wear all of the velvet his little heart desires. Just come back, Tommy! We miss you. It’s almost like I didn’t even realize how good I had it last year, when Hiddles was practically our dancing bear every damn day. Good times.

Anyway, in my Dragonfly Withdrawal, I’ve been searching high and low to find anything, something I could write about for Hiddles. And now I’ve found TWO things! HUZZAH. The first is pretty weak – an ELLE UK interview with Natalie Portman where she mentions how much she loved slapping Hiddles:

When ELLE cover star Tom Hiddleston interviewed ELLE cover star Natalie Portman, she told him how much she enjoyed hitting him in the face while filming Thor: The Dark World (“Oh my god, it was so good”). He enjoyed it too, btw. “It was really fun” he told us. Who knew their tastes ran in that direction?

Now Natalie has expanded on her feelings for Tom, who was named Man of The Year at the ELLE Style Awards…”Tom is wonderful,” she says. “He plays Loki [the god of Mischief] and he’s just an incredible actor who finds so much humor in his evil. He’s also fun to be around, and he and Chris [Hemsworth] have a great rapport with each other. They’ve got sort of a brotherly thing. They really enjoy each other and annoy each other in a loving, joking way. It’s fun to be around.”

[From ELLE UK]

Oh, so Tommy likes it rough? That’s what I’m getting. Tommy likes it when you punish him a little bit. And what’s great is that you’ll enjoy it too. BYOBG (bring your own ball gag).

Next up: Tommy did an interview with HuffPo UK, for the same reason Natalie did the ELLE UK piece – to promote the DVD release of Thor: The Dark Loki. You can read the full piece here. There’s a lot of stuff we already know some I’m culling the interview a little bit. Some highlights:

When you first read the script for Thor, did you ever imagine the character of Loki would connect with audiences as much as he has?
Absolutely not. Nope. Never. I mean, that was the best-case scenario – but it was probably far beyond what I could possibly have conceived. I remember reading the first script and being incredibly excited by it, but at that point it was the early beginnings of the creation of the character. It feels great to have built something so massive and rich and detailed.

What research into the world of Loki and Thor did you undertake when you first joined the franchise?
I read all the comics, all the way back to Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. I also read J Michael Stracynzki’s most recent reworking, as well as the Walt Simonson comics. I read the Norse myths, and I listened to Wagner because Loki turns up in the Ring Cycle. [Thor director] Kenneth Branagh and I also stole from Shakespeare because Loki is like Iago [from Othello]. He’s like Macbeth, and he’s like Edmund in King Lear. He seems like a character of such enormous dimensions and with so many interesting shades. The script that I read was an origin story for both Thor and Loki, and I think his mischievous aspects were only starting to come about towards the end of that first film.

Coming to LA for the first time and auditioning for everything: “Thor was being cast during my first ever trip to Los Angeles as an actor. I’d been signed by an agent on the back of a Shakespeare play I did in London and they said to me: “Come to LA and we’ll introduce you to the city.” I auditioned for everything under the sun: television series, films that you’ve seen, films that have been huge hits – and films that haven’t. Thor was one of them and it was a potential opportunity for me because I had a connection to Kenneth Branagh; I’d worked with him in the theatre. I thought, ‘At least there’s someone in this world of Hollywood who I don’t have to prove something to because he knows I can act.’ It was just a matter of trying to prove it to the studio, so I had to audition.”

Being cast as Loki: “When I auditioned for Thor, I didn’t know about the existence of Loki – but I think Chris Hemsworth and I were cast in the same week. I was waiting to hear whether I’d got the job of Thor or not, but they called Chris on a Wednesday and they called me on a Thursday. Kevin [Feige] and Ken [Branagh] called me personally and said, “Well, you’re not going to play Thor but we would like you to play Loki.” Ken said to me, “Actually, this is the role that I would want to play.” In a way, it was a gift – and I have no regrets about it at all. I’ve never once thought, ‘I wish I were playing Thor.’

The strangest fan reaction to the character: “I’ve had some very strange fan mail over the years. There’s a moment in the first Thor movie where Thor and Loki are engaged in a fight. I have a spear in my hand and I make a huge leap to spear Chris – but he dodges out of the way. The spear is embedded into the ground, so I use the spear as a lever to spin myself around and kick him in the chest. Well, some fans have interpreted this as emblematic of my hidden talent at pole dancing. I’ve received a surprising number of depictions of myself in a pair of tight briefs and a horny helmet dancing on a pole. That is pretty weird and hilarious.

The most mischievous thing he did as a kid: “Once, my cousin and I thought it would be fun to hide underneath our beds at bath time. We were four or five years old, and we were in the middle of a game, so we didn’t want to sit in the bath. We stayed there for hours, but we decided to come out when my aunt picked up the phone to call the police. I’m generally well behaved now, but that was 25 years ago. That’s the sort of thing you do when you’re five, right?”

[From HuffPo]

What I’m getting from this is that Tommy doesn’t explicitly deny that he has some prowess on the pole. OMG. Imagine his snake hips and club-boy dancing with a stripper’s pole at the ready. OMG. If Tommy ever wants to raise an insane amount of money for charity, that’s what he should do. He doesn’t even have to make a night of it. Just ten minutes, on stage, shirtless and dancing his dances and then playing around on a stripper pole. I would pay a lot of money to see that. And so would the dragonflies.

Velvet photos courtesy of PR Photos.