Tom Hiddleston On Fame, Tom Hanks and the Taylor Swift Breakup

The world of Loki off screen has been a rollercoaster ride of wild ups and downs in 2016. Culminating with the on-again, off-again relationship to recording artist Taylor Swift. The 35-year old continues to forge ahead with his movie career to wrap shooting on Thor: Ragnarok in Australia, now the Englishman has sat down to discuss some life lessons he has taken on board. Especially since he has recently been surrounded with a flurry of headlines and tabloid reports.

Hiddleston took home a Golden Globe award for Best Actor in a Miniseries or Television Film for his role in The Night Manager earlier this year. But even that moment was not without controversy. On the podium, the actor was lambasted for praising the program while promoting a worthy cause, illustrating how intense the spotlight can be.

No Place To Hide As Tom Learns The Hard Way

Thor Dark World Tom Hiddleston

These public setbacks can often cause a person to retreat into themselves and venture off on a tangent. But the actor believes the best method to dealing with scrutiny and pressure is to deal with it head on.

“If your values are under attack, if you’re being shamed, if you’re being humiliated, the animal response is to hide in the bush," Hiddleston says. "It’s to be less, to make yourself smaller, to diminish in size and volume. And the lesson of 2016 is we have to love more, we have to risk more, we have to be braver, we have to be more outspoken.”

Taking cues from one of his compatriots, Hiddleston points to Tom Hanks as an inspiration on and off screen for how he carries himself.

"His decency is poured into everything he does,” he remarks of Hanks. “I’m nowhere near Tom Hanks’s contribution or even close. All of it’s not high art, you know? But there is a value in it, you know, somehow, somewhere.”

Balancing The Public and Private Persona

Tom Hiddleston High Rise

Looking back on his brief relationship with pop star Taylor Swift, Hiddleston pointed to one image in particular that was blown up by the tabloids. Spotted on the beach with his new partner in a shirt that read, 'I ♥ T.S,' the actor said it was all in good fun.

“Taylor is an amazing woman,” explained Hiddleston. “She’s generous and kind and lovely, and we had the best time... The truth is, it was the Fourth of July and a public holiday and we were playing a game and I slipped and hurt my back. And I wanted to protect the graze from the sun and said, ’Does anyone have a T-shirt?’ And one of her friends said, ’I’ve got this.’ The friend pulled out the 'I ♥ T.S' tank top that Taylor’s friends are contractually obligated to own. “And we all laughed about it. It was a joke.”

With the public fallout having such a profound impact after the breakup, Hiddleston is philosophical about the saga and indicates that he is wiser for the experience.

“I have to be so psychologically strong about not letting other people’s interpretations about my life affect my life. A relationship exists between two people. We will always know what it was. The narratives that are out there altogether have been extrapolated from pictures that were taken without consent or permission, with no context. Nobody had the context for that story. And I’m still trying to work out a way of having a personal life and protecting it, but also without hiding."

Source: GQ

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