Tom Hiddleston: 'The dream is to keep surprising yourself'

A couple of years ago Kenneth Branagh said it was going to be Tom Hiddleston's year. And in so many ways it was: huge critical acclaim for his Cassio in Othello at the Donmar; an Olivier for best newcomer as Cloten/Posthumous in Cheek by Jowl's Cymbeline ; and TV credits which included being Branagh's sidekick in Wallander .And all this just three years after Rada, which itself followed a double-first in classics from Cambridge. There have been worse lives. But this is surely the year Tom Hiddleston will be discovered by the public as well as the critics, with two films that couldn't really be more different. First up is Archipelago , the second feature from Joanna Hogg whose Unrelated won the 2008 Guardian First Film award. Archipelago is an astonishing, soon mesmerising tale of an upper-middle-class family imploding on a break in the Scilly Isles; all long, moody shots and tight, claustrophic tension, much of the dialogue quite improvised. It is brilliant, but it's fair to say it's not a popcorn pic. For that you'll need to wait for Hiddleston's turn as Loki in Branagh's much-awaited epic Thor . It would be a delight, or at least say something about balance and hubris, to be able to report that he's moodily curmudgeonly. Infuriatingly, he's charming, funny, passionate, eloquent and impossibly stylish, and the first to admit he has been a little blessed. "Blessed, in part, with the differences in the scripts I've been able to take. It was a strange experience, finishing Archipelago , where we'd all moved into the actual house in the film, for seven weeks, to read and then live and improvise the story; then fly to LA for this $150m sci-fi epic. But that's what I love. I've always admired those actors who constantly surprise you. Ralph Fiennes, Anthony Hopkins, Daniel Day-Lewis. The dream is to keep surprising yourself, never mind the audience." Hogg certainly surprises the audience, not least in her subject-matter, what you might call the moneyed middle-class of today. "Absolutely. Joanna points her camera at a section of society unused to having cameras pointed at it. But I don't know about categorising them in terms of class; I'm a bit wary of that. My dad is the son of a shipbuilder." Later this year he's in the new Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris , and then opposite Rachel Weisz in Terence Rattigan's 1952 classic The Deep Blue Sea , followed by Steven Spielberg's War Horse . It is, he concedes, withcharming understatement, not a bad life.