Tom Hiddleston Biography

Tom Hiddleston is the classically trained English actor who is best known for his role as Loki in the Marvel Comics movies, including 2011’s Thor and 2012’s The Avengers.

A graduate of Cambridge and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, he began acting professionally while still in school. After 2005, he was out of school and making a name for himself as a bold newcomer on the stage; he also scored a leading role in his 2007 film debut, Unrelated.

His film career got a big boost thanks to Kenneth Branagh, with whom he’d worked on stage and in the BBC television series Wallander (where Hiddleston spent two seasons playing a sour junior detective). Branagh was set to direct the film version of Thor, and he brought in Hiddleston, who auditioned for the title role but ended up as Loki, the villain.

Between big action films, Hiddleston has performed on British television and smaller, independent films, and in 2014 made a high-profile return to the English stage in a production of Coriolanus. His other credits playing F. Scott Fitzgerald in Woody Allen‘s Midnight in Paris (2011), a noble captain in Steven Spielberg‘s War Horse (2011), singer Hank Williams in I Saw the Light (2015), a disconnected tenant in High-Rise (2015, based on the novel by J.G. Ballard), and an undercover British agent chasing an arms dealer (Hugh Laurie) in the miniseries The Night Manager.