Photos of Tom Hiddleston filming a second season of The Night Manager in London with Indira Varma popped up on Friday, and it immediately sent me down a nostalgic gossip rabbit hole.
Remember Swoki? The short, cursed relationship between Tom Hiddleston and Taylor Swift in the summer of 2016, before we knew he was the getaway car and Joe Alwyn was waiting in the wings. When it was all tank tops and date nights, and for a shining moment, Hiddleswift, Swoki, whatever your preferred portmanteau was, seemed like a match made in thirsty fame heaven.
The Night Manager is permanently linked to Swoki in my mind, and more particularly with Tom Hiddleston’s, well, not fall from grace, exactly, but this was definitely the moment the internet decided he wasn’t their #1 boy anymore. The Night Manager aired in 2016. It was a hit, especially in the UK, where it was one of the biggest series of the year, and it went on to be nominated for and win many awards, including an Emmy for director Susanna Bier, and Golden Globes for stars Hugh Laurie, Olivia Colman, and Tom Hiddleston. Of course, the 2017 Golden Globes is where Tom delivered a truly cringe-worthy acceptance speech, which just capped off what had already been a brutal run of publicity following his split from Taylor Swift the previous September.
Actually, what really capped off Tom’s bad run was Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s now iconic interview in GQ, which came out after the Golden Globes and served as a sort of grace note to the whole Swoki saga. In that interview, Tom genuinely seemed sad, and more than a little befuddled about where everything went wrong over the previous six months.
Up until Swoki, he’d enjoyed a multi-year run as the internet’s favorite white boy, a standout Marvel star playing a beloved character, who was also doing legit acting work like a West End production of Coriolanus and, well, The Night Manager, which was a high watermark for his screen career at the time.
But Swoki brought it all down. It was too much, too much cheese and too much thirst, and for some reason, the public didn’t buy it like we’re buying TNT. On paper, they were a good match. Tom excels in his own arena, and so didn’t seem put off by Taylor’s superstardom. He seemed thrilled to be with her, happy to play games for the camera, happy to be public with their relationship. And then it just stopped working, which at the time everyone said was about the Emmys and/or who wanted to be more public with their love, but now we know Joe Alwyn was always there, on Cornelia Street.
When I look back on Swoki Summer and Tom Hiddleston’s public persona meltdown that followed, I wonder if Taylor would have gotten off so easily if Tom HADN’T delivered that speech at the Golden Globes. Because that had nothing to do with Taylor, and it gave everyone a legit reason to eyeroll him separate from Swoki shenanigans. It was like we were already side-eyeing him, and then he handed us a reason to full-on eye roll on a silver platter and Taylor Swift had precisely zero to do with it, so all the Swoki mess got buried under the Golden Globes mess until it became an amalgamized ball of the worst six months of Tom Hiddleston’s career, and we mostly just remember how embarrassing HE was, not her. Even when she put out an entire album about using him, we just went, Well, he does seem like A Lot.
Since then, Tom has been nominated for a Tony, he’s starred in two much admired seasons of Loki, and he’s starring in Mike Flanagan’s latest Stephen King adaptation, The Life of Chuck, which is premiering at TIFF this fall. And now he’s bringing back The Night Manager, easily his most acclaimed role outside Marvel. He’s settled down with Zawe Ashton and their kid, and though he remains popular, mostly via Marvel, he maintains a much lower profile than he did eight years ago.
Some of that is inevitably an effect of time—he’s in his 40s now, and it's a rare celebrity who doesn’t eventually cede some spotlight to a younger crowd—but some of it is undoubtedly the lingering effect of Swoki and everything that came after. He keeps his relationship mostly out of the spotlight, keeps his kid even more on the downlow, and hasn’t given an interview as emotionally naked as the one he gave Taffy. The excitable Tom Hiddleston who dominated pop culture in the first half of the 2010s is long gone…except for all the ways Austin Butler reminds me of him. But that’s another topic.
