This happened to me the last time I interviewed Tom Hiddleston for The Avengers. I don’t know how I forgot. That he’s SOOOOOOOO f-cking charming and thoughtful and smart and nice. Tom was my first interview yesterday, followed immediately by Elizabeth Olsen. As Sarah just noted in her review, I Saw The Light isn’t great. Especially if you don’t know anything about Hank Williams. That would be me. What I do know now is that my ma’s favourite song, Your Cheating Heart, is one of his. The reason I didn’t know this is because my ma only listened to the Patsy Cline version so the song, to me, is always from a woman’s perspective. Ma related to it in a way that felt important, even though I was really young when she first started playing it. Some of my most vivid memories of being with ma, on her saddest days, are connected to Your Cheating Heart. So now that I’ve realised that I have this personal connection to Hank Williams, I wish the film would have told me more, or organised it better. And Tom works so hard for his performance, is so earnest and so engaging and so passionate about this role, it’s hard not to want more and better for him.
First of all, he was on time. When you spend most of your time during a film festival waiting on celebrities, it’s really refreshing when they’re punctual. And also when they don’t come in looking bored, or refusing to make eye contact with you because they’d rather keep having personal conversations with their entourage. Tom initiated conversation with us first. He was lovely to our crew. And all that on top of the fact that, again, how did I forget how handsome he is. SO handsome in person. The bone structure. And his body is so well proportioned. And then he starts reciting Hank Williams lyrics at you in his English accent and suddenly I’m like, holy sh-t, crushing HARD. Crushing really, really hard.
15 minutes later it was a double crush because Elizabeth Olsen was… I love her. She was early! And she’s a talker too. I can’t tell you how many actors sit across from you before the interview starts, while they’re getting miced, and they’re just mute, letting you know with their silence how insignificant you are. Elizabeth asks you to call her “Lizzie” and wants the conversation to mean something. I was so impressed. Her answers are considered, her reactions are totally spontaneous, she felt as real to me as any celebrity I’ve ever interviewed. And it was the same for our entire team – she had the whole room.
So, yes, they should totally be together. Even though she’s saying that they’re not. During an interview with Refinery29, when asked straight up whether or not she and Tom are dating, she insisted that they’re not but that people will come to their own conclusions anyway. When they were photographed together a few weeks ago, she said it was a friendly dinner, no big. A lot of people don’t believe her. I’m not sure I believe her. But for what it’s worth, I can tell you that at the I Saw The Light after-party, aside from posing for photos together, they barely had any interaction.
