Tom Hiddleston apparently gave millions of new interviews while he was promoting back-to-back films at TIFF. I’ll be damned if I can really tell the difference between some of the interviews though – either different sites are running with the same quotes over and over, or Tom just gave the same quotes over and over. There is this interesting interview which Tom did with Uproxx about High Rise and only High Rise. Apparently, Tom (who plays a doctor in the film) did research for the part by observing a coroner/medical examiner perform autopsies. Of course, Tom is just full of so many words:

His ‘interesting experience’ filming High Rise: “The experience, there’s two parts to my answer: One is I take particular pleasure in creating an intellectual and imaginative context in which to place myself when we shoot… in some way, I’ve built a thematic scaffolding so then I can then be instinctive.”

On J.G. Ballard: “For me, it was about J.G. Ballard’s intellectual worldview. I read about his experience with violence and extremity in Shanghai. I read all the books: I read Conflict Island, I read Crash again and read some of his interviews about the obsession in the human race about technology and how that was going to create a new kind of mythology. That the industrialization of the moving image was going to become so deeply embedded into our culture that it would actually shift our psychological patterns. It’s all true; it’s all happened. He predicted Instagram and YouTube. He didn’t call them that…

Preparing for his role as a doctor: “I went a spent a day in a hospital doing autopsies with a forensic pathologist, observing autopsies….I didn’t have to. But I knew, when there’s the dissection of the severed head…”

Actually seeing autopsies: “I almost fainted. And my brain in that moment couldn’t handle seeing the human engineering, the flesh of it — to literally see a person opened up. And this highly skilled expert who is simply doing his job is deconstructing this body like he’s a mechanic. He’s trying to determine the cause of death. He suspected there was a brain hemorrhage, and he opened the skull and examined the brain. And he showed me that this is what he was looking for and there’s nothing physiology wrong with the brain. So, he’s going to have to find the cause of death probably in his guts and his kidneys. And he said this fascinating thing: Behavioral dysfunction is very rarely detectable in the physical matter of the brain. So if there’s something behaviorally wrong with somebody, whether they are prone to hysteria or schizophrenia or depression or all of these very genuine diagnosable disorders, it’s sometimes very hard when you’re examining the physical matter of someone’s head; it’s very hard to see it. The rest of it is just chemicals and nurture.”

[From Uproxx]

There’s actually a condition that some people have, where they literally faint at the sight of blood, death, maiming, etc. I don’t think I have that condition, but I get seriously queasy at the sight/sound/description of broken bones and extreme medical conditions or medical events. What I’m saying is that if I had to observe an autopsy, I would probably faint (and I would make Tom catch me). There’s a reason Tommy Hiddles is an actor, not a coroner! And there’s a reason why I’m a gossip blogger, not a doctor. *hork*

Photos courtesy of WENN, Fame/Flynet, Getty.