Tom Hiddleston on his naked butt: We all have one!

Dear mum,

I think I’m in love. I met the loveliest bloke at work just the other day. I was just sitting there in the Mandarin Oriental New York and there he was, across from me, going on and on about some new gothic romance horror film. I think it was called Crimson Peak and someone named Guillermo del Toro was directing it.

It’s really hard to focus when a tall, 1.87m glass of British goodness named Tom Hiddleston is doing the talking.

He’s as smart as a whip, wears a suit exceedingly well, occasionally wears spectacles that make him look like the cutest little academic ever to crack open a Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy for some light reading. Oh and that accent, yum. Hiddles — as I shall call him from now on — is from England.

You might remember him as the dashing WWI British army captain in War Horse or F Scott Fitzgerald in Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris or Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, most recently on the London stage. No? What about his turn as the perfidious Norse god Loki, the brother of Thor and scene-stealer in the Marvel franchise? You’ll also be seeing a lot of him in the coming months. Aside from Crimson Peak, he’s also playing musician Hank Williams in the biopic I Saw The Light and Dr Robert Laing in Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of JG Ballard’s High-Rise.

Now don’t you get all concerned about whether he’s self-absorbed and capricious like other dramatic thespians because I swear he’s not. Hiddles — is it catching on? —takes his work very seriously.

For his role in Crimson Peak, as the mysterious handsome aristocrat Sir Thomas Sharpe, he plowed through a gothic romance reading list as homework from that Guillermo guy.

“Guillermo and I mostly talked about the literary antecedent of gothic romance … Udolpho is long!” he said with a tinkly laugh. “But I think he pointed me to that novel because the generic structure of that is what he has taken for Crimson Peak, and also subverting the expectations of gothic romance.”

Right. Whatever. You’re hot.

By this time, the conversation was going smoothly. I compliment him on how he manages to bring out the nuances of any role he takes, whether it’s Sharpe or Loki.

“Thank you very much! That’s what I really worked on,” he replied (to me!).

“The character I read in the screenplay was not a villain. And everyone knows I play villains before. But this character was different. And I wanted to make him different. Because in Thomas Sharpe is the tension in the film between the past and the future. He is absolutely trapped by his past. Trapped by his guilt, his shame and his responsibility for the past. But he is struggling to free himself and live in the future. And be a better man. And the arc for me, is one from a place of darkness into light. Edith is the light that shows him it’s possible to be good.”

What about Loki? “With that character, he needed to be larger than life. He needed to have an enormous charisma, that sort of had a magnetism even though everything he wanted was wrong. Does that make sense? So yeah, as an actor, you do have to put yourself in extreme places.”

Like right beside me, I thought to myself.

Oblivious to my internal monologue, he continued talking about his experience on a set as dark as Crimson Peak. “It was very intense. I think the film has such a sincerity and that demanded a particularly commitment from us (the actors). And sometimes when you’re living in the psychological intensity of those scenes, day after day after day, there is a cost to it. There is a pay-off. It’s interesting.

It’s always hard to describe this but even if the circumstances, which inspire emotional responses, are fictional, the emotional responses are real. So if you’re committed to representing fear or despair or terror or grief as an actor, your mind and your body can still recognise if you’ve been crying.”

Goodness, doesn’t that just show his level of tenacity and willingness to his craft? Imagine what kind of dinner he’ll cook for our first official date …

But don’t worry, mum, he’s not all doom and gloom all the time. In fact, he’s got a lighter side in that typical cheeky, dry British way. Like when I asked him whether he believes in ghosts, seeing as how Crimson Peak is all about the supernatural.

“It’s funny you know? Round the campfire as a teenager, when you’re on holiday with friends and people start telling ghost stories, I thought I had a couple of experiences when I was a child. But I am sure they were just projections of my overactive imagination,” he said.

“I don’t know if you’ve had this, but I’ve walked into a building and felt a strange energy. And then found out that some terrible things happen there. I don’t know if buildings can somehow retain an echo of things that have happened in the past. Like when I was at this very old hotel in Reims, France, and there was very weird energy in my room that night. Plus, it was overlooking the one of the most famous gothic cathedrals in the world (Notre-Dame de Reims). Pretty spooky.

“What really scares me? My imagination mostly. My imagination is responsible for my fear of sharks, for example. So I’ll be swimming in the sea and suddenly I’ll want to swim back because I can’t see what’s beneath me. It’s just the fear of the unknown! I also think hysteria is terrifying! I find collective hysteria very scary. I think when people or a crowd gets whipped up to a place where they can’t think logically anymore,I find that energy quite frightening!”

At that point, it was all going, well, swimmingly. But I couldn’t resist one final question.

Was it more difficult delving into the psychologically twisted world of Thomas Sharpe — or baring his behind on-camera for the movie, which he did during a love-making scene with actress Mia Wasikowska.

“I worked with (actress) Tilda Swinton (in the film Only Lovers Left Alive, where they shared a naked embrace). And I remember her saying, ‘Oh we are all born this way. It’s not like we’re showing anything new! So, yes, definitely, the psychological tension was harder.”

Clever, funny, engaging, smart and very thoughtful. So tell me, mum, what do you think of your future son-in-law?

Crimson Peak opens in cinemas tomorrow.