Amidst the summer’s plethora of advertisements aimed at the moronic, desperate and gullible, an especially crass one stands out. Ralph Lauren have decided, for reasons best known to themselves, that their well-heeled and preppy customers need the unholy duo of the actor Tom Hiddleston and a computer-generated ‘Polo Bear’ to advertise their product.
Over a series of embarrassing-looking commercials, poorly scripted and indifferently filmed, Hiddleston has to spout dialogue along the lines of ‘Strawberries and cream are one of life’s great lessons in simplicity’, watched by a huge, mute ursine, who is as close to a more sinister-looking version of Paddington as he might be without Michael Bond’s estate being paid a royalty.
I am not entirely sure as to which bright spark came up with the idea that what the Ralph Lauren brand really needed was the combination of Hiddleston and a bear, but now we have it, and social media has duly been flooded with videos of the Old Etonian and Cambridge-educated actor manfully attempting to give his bathetic utterances some kind of nuance and interest. It would have been a hard task for Laurence Olivier (who, lest we forget, was reduced to flogging Polaroid cameras towards the end of his life) to pull off, but Hiddleston, for all his undoubted charm and rabid fandom, is no Olivier, and so the odd-couple dynamic of him and a grizzly is devoid of anything apart from a certain strange curiosity.
The questions that I asked after watching the advertisements were firstly ‘Why?’, then ‘How?’ and lastly, but not least, ‘Does Tom Hiddleston need the money that badly?’ Olivier did, but that was because his health was suffering and after many years of acclaimed but hardly lucrative stage work, he wished to provide financially for his family. But a glance at Hiddleston’s recent career suggests that he is an actor who should hardly be prostituting himself in this manner. He recently starred in an acclaimed Much Ado About Nothing opposite Hayley Atwell; reprised his bottom-baring role in The Night Manager’s second series (where, once again, he was acted off the screen by his fellow OE Hugh Laurie); plays in Soccer Aid; and raises two children with his wife Zawe Ashton.
It might be the latter that has led to this unseemly wish for moolah. It is unlikely that the junior Hiddlestons will be going to the local comprehensive any time soon, and school fees are rising at a precipitous rate thanks to the current government. But there are ways of taking on well-paid, artistically unfulfilling work and not looking as if one has sold one’s soul to do so, and, unfortunately, Hiddleston has been dogged for most of his career by the shadow of Loki, the Marvel anti-hero who he has played repeatedly in a variety of films and television series.
It seems strange to remember that when Hiddleston first appeared as Loki in the Kenneth Branagh-directed Thor (2011), he was a little-known British character actor who was probably best known for appearing alongside Wallander in the television series Wallander. The part gave him an international fanbase of millions, presumably a vast amount of money in the bank and household name recognition. Yet it also stymied what looked at one point as if it was going to be an exciting career as a great classical actor. Branagh made no bones about serving as a mentor to Hiddleston, with the two appearing alongside each other in a 2008 staging of Ivanov, and there seemed the potential for the younger actor to have a similar career trajectory to the veteran thespian, combining one-for-them paycheque roles with genuinely interesting and forward-looking performances.
It seems a lifetime ago that he was a brawny, brainy Coriolanus at the Donmar Warehouse in 2013
This has, unfortunately, not come to pass. Hiddleston hasn’t given a great screen performance since 2015, when he was well cast as the lead in Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel High-Rise, and while he won acclaim for his appearances in the theatre in Betrayal and Much Ado, it seems a lifetime ago that he was a brawny, brainy Coriolanus at the Donmar Warehouse in 2013. It was then that I knew that he had the potential to achieve greatness if he wanted to, but unfortunately the demands of the Marvel roles got in the way, and so he has become a rather disappointing figure, churning out variations on the same schtick again. And when he does try and break the mould – as in the flop Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck – the results are usually unsuccessful.
I would dearly love Hiddleston – a man who is, by all accounts, one of the genuinely nicest and warmest people in the industry – to be given, or to look for, the kind of roles and opportunities that an actor of his considerable talent deserves. Otherwise, he will be stuck in this talent-munching morass for the rest of his career, and that would be, in its own small way, a tragic waste of one of Britain’s most talented thespians. If that does happen, that it literally would be a case of exit, pursued by a bear.
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