Tom Hiddleston ventures into foreign territory with Hank Williams biopic

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It doesn't take long into our interview before Tom Hiddleston pulls out his cellphone and begins to scroll through tracks, listing off hit after hit and talking open E chords and the common 1-4-5 blues progression that starts several of Hank Williams's country songs. "But Honky Tonk Blues is rock 'n' roll," the British actor declares. At this, he launches into its opening lyric while the phone's music fills the hotel room; like Williams in an old Opry clip, Hiddleston's booted toe starts tapping and his chin bobs along.

This show of enthusiasm is decidedly different from a similar scene in the film Hiddleston premiered at last year's Toronto International Film Festival. I Saw the Light, director Marc Abraham's somewhat cautious and decidedly reverent new biopic of Williams, is based in part on music journalist Colin Escott's well-regarded 1994 biography. In a scene late in the movie a reticent Williams, by then a big but troubled star, sits for a newspaper interview because "it comes with the job." An arrogant New York journalist has just met him at a hotel and, after first mistaking a bandmate for his subject, opens with an intrusive personal question and the excuse of giving readers "insight into you as an artist." The interview ends quickly.

Silly sod, he should have talked about the work.

The songwriter's story is one of creative genius and demons soaked in equal parts Southern gentility and booze: After six years, 36 hits and millions in record sales, Williams died of heart failure in 1953 at the age of 29. When Hiddleston first read Abraham's screenplay five years ago he says he knew maybe five or six of Williams's songs, but nothing of his personal life. "There was a lot of humanity in the story," the actor says. There's also a lot of music: It's the first film about Williams in 50 years to be granted rights to use his songs, so by the time Hiddleston was in Canada making Crimson Peak with Guillermo del Toro over the winter of 2014, "I had my guitar with me and was already practising." Then came several weeks under the tutelage of country singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell before filming began in Shreveport, La.

"As an actor I'm always drawn to foreign territory," Hiddleston explains. "Even as a child. There's something very exotic about authentic Americana. Whether it was westerns or baseball or like the pedal steel of a Hank Williams song, which is the soundtrack to The Last Picture Show. That sort of twang is just not a sound that comes out of Europe.

Not for the first time, Hiddleston is playing a part based on a real person (he's been Charles Darwin and F. Scott Fitzgerald), but they don't exist in the cultural canon as Williams does – and it's not like there's footage of Henry V kicking around. "There are pictures of his pudding-bowl haircut," Hiddleston interjects with a laugh, about his turn as Shakespeare's callow Prince Hal in The Hollow Crown; "I decided not to make that choice!"

With the Hank Williams role, Hiddleston dealt with what little exists of archival footage ("the way his knees knocked together when he gets in the groove") to understand something of Williams's physical limitations. The singer suffered chronic back pain and Hiddleston's Hank always seems slightly uncomfortable, slumped in chairs or in the back of his powder-blue Cadillac. But he's never a literal mimic: In performances throughout the film, it's his rich baritone and not Williams's reedy tenor that shine. Interpretation, not imitation.

Hank Williams Jr. once told a biographer that to understand his famous father "you don't need anyone else to explain him to you." Just listen to his albums. Not only the hits where the country star is performing as himself but the ones where he assumes the persona of Luke the Drifter, a darker alter ego through whom Williams wrote and recorded like a reproachful gospel preacher. He looms over Hiddleston's performance.

"Everybody has a little darkness in them – anger, misery, sorrow, shame, and they hear it," Hank says in the movie. That facet of Williams "became the key part for me, in terms of finding his voice," the actor recalls. "Sometimes in the morning before we started the day I would just do a Luke the Drifter recitation, or Marc would start a take of me doing some Luke and then we'd go into the scenes."

Not much else on the page suggests that an Eton and Cambridge-educated actor with plummy, crisp English elocution could embody America's iconic "hillbilly Shakespeare." But consider Hiddleston's other choices. His early work on Wallander as a colleague of the existential inspector played by Kenneth Branagh is probably his least complicated role, but Branagh detected enough of a glint for the soulful, tortured or outright deliciously wicked to soon cast him as the villainous Loki in Thor, which has cemented his status in the blockbuster realm.

"The other thing is that, actually, it's a film about show business," the actor says of I Saw the Light. "Simply the pressure of being a professional. That there are demands on you, people have a lot at stake: backers, sponsors, record labels, publishing houses, and there's a tension between the authenticity of the material, and the commercial requirement. There was something to tell there." In the film, Hank cannily observes many around him as "people looking to make a nice pie with a piece of me." But like other artists, especially musicians, there's an obligation to his audience and fans – something that Hiddleston thinks is "amazingly noble."

That comes to mind months later, as Hiddleston gamely promotes not only the Williams biopic but two other upcoming projects – Ben Wheatley's dystopian drama High-Rise and John le Carré's The Night Manager (airing on AMC starting April 19). Williams charmed his way into a career by singing on street corners, selling peanuts and shining shoes; for all his eventual demons, the spindly beer- and sweat-soaked legend was as persuasive as his talent. On publicity tours Hiddleston is popular for being sincere and affable, even joyous – making the rounds of late-night talk shows while being teased about #Hiddlesbum (the latest instalment of his rabid fandom's near-daily new hashtags and portmanteaux). Although, unlike Williams, he's unfailingly courteous of almost any request. Toward the end of our interview, I considered asking for a mashup "Loki the Drifter" recitation. I have little doubt he would have obliged.