Inside Pompeii with Tom Hiddleston: the hidden detail that most people miss

[00:00:00]I am somewhere quite incredible right now. I'm in Pompeii. If you've clicked on this video, you've probably heard of Tom Hiddleston. He's Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Jonathan Pine in spy drama The Night Manager, but I'm here to talk about Pompeii out of time, his new docu-drama in which he explores the disaster through the eyes of three real Romans he's found in the historical records. Like and subscribe for more from History Extra, but now here's the full interview.

[00:00:26]>> Tom, it's wonderful to be here. You first came to Pompeii as a teenager.

[00:00:30]>> Yeah.

[00:00:31]>> Pompeii is right behind us over here.

[00:00:33]>> How has your feeling changed about it since that time?

[00:00:36]>> Well, now it feels incredibly resonant because I've spent the time making this series, and it's so interesting because I'm 45, and there's a little bit of distance now between my myself and my youth, I suppose, and I look back to that time.

[00:00:53]I was so passionate and so curious as a young person about the ancient world. It was my specialist area of study. I did Latin and Greek for A level at school, and it was in the end of my lower sixth form year, that summer I came to Italy with two friends who were doing ancient history and history of art, and it this area was perfect for all of us and all of our interests, and and Pompeii really brought to life the living past, that it was a place that the study of the ancient world wasn't something you just read about in a book. It was something you could visit and discover and and learn about and be curious about, and then it and reimagine and rethink and replay. And um so, what Pompeii means to me is it's really the root of so much of my adult curiosity.

[00:01:50]>> And you talk about bringing it to life, and that's what you do in the series.

[00:01:53]So, you're combining the historical evidence with that imagining part, story telling part.

[00:01:58]How how should we be careful not to imprint too much of ourselves on that process and our societal morals to put things onto these people?

[00:02:07]>> Very important. It's really important to have the rigor and the discipline to know that I was taught at university by the great Mary Beard and she was literally she was one of my supervisors and one of her the things that I remember her saying is the richness of studying the deep past is that you learn very immediately they were just like us.

[00:02:27]And in the same breath, they were not like us at all. And that tension exists in that you feel that you see the bread they found in Herculaneum in the oven still baking and preserved 1700 1800 years later or or babies cradles that look like the cots that we put our babies in. And yet they they were so many things they did completely differently, ways they conceived of the world of themselves, of themselves within a grand scheme, within their religion, within their conception of the universe and the earth.

[00:03:00]And so as you rightly point out, it's really important to have the discipline of not um overemphasizing or projecting who we are too much uh onto who they were even though there's a dialogue um and but to your point, I think and historians have now told me this that there is an element of educated guesswork or or or refined imagination in any process of history. That the history itself is is built of and made up of fragments, fragments of a jigsaw puzzle and you don't have a complete picture. And so maybe in order to join these two dots that don't connect there has to be a leap of imagination.

[00:03:51]And so the whole business history, the business of writing and studying history is a combination of evidence and imagination.

[00:03:57]>> And in terms of telling those stories, one conversation I was really fascinated by in the drama was with disaster/survival psychologist who helped them.

[00:04:05]>> She's amazing.

[00:04:06]>> Yeah, and you were talking about how the Pompeiians reacted to this unfolding cataclysm. And I wonder how you thought you would have reacted on that day, and if that reaction changed over the course of the filming.

[00:04:17]>> It's really difficult, of course, cuz now I know I know what happened.

[00:04:21]>> [laughter] >> So But I think it's what's really interesting is it uses a study of what we know of human beings' behavior.

[00:04:29]And Serita's really brilliant about this. She says that there's very, very few individuals who have the sufficient experience and leadership and imagination to act in a crisis. So many people are waiting for a leader to emerge to tell them what to do. You find yourself in an emergency, any emergency that we might be in now, you know, do you get off the bus? Do you Is it time to disembark the airplane? Do we Do we get out of the water? Do we go come down from the mountain? Um uh all these things that might take place in our lives and and leaders are few and far between and so many of us would would wait to see. I mean, I think we all went through it quite recently with the pandemic. Was that sense of not quite knowing what to do? Uh is it okay? Are we okay? Certain protocols. Are we okay? Are we going to do we hurt each other by being close to each other? When's it okay to go back to normal and and um So, to answer your question succinctly, what would I do if I were back in that time?

[00:05:29]I'd like to think I would know that the volcanic eruption was something unusual.

[00:05:36]And it needed an unusual response. That it wasn't just a storm that might pass in the morning.

[00:05:43]But so many, sadly, that's what they thought. And yet some didn't, as we learn in didn't.

[00:05:47]>> Where would you recommend someone goes to Pompeii if they've never been before?

[00:05:51]Something surprising.

[00:05:54]>> I think you should have to go to Julia Felix's house because it's right near the entrance. It's almost you go into Pompeii and and that's the first house you find. And what's so astonishing about it is how much of it's been preserved. It's not just a private house, it's an estate. And you start to understand the sophistication of the architecture, the sophistication of the building arrangements, the sophistication of the business itself.

[00:06:17]It's the most beautiful garden and that there's it's it's almost like a it's a bathhouse. It's a a bathhouse for respectable people. We might think of it as a a spa, a spa retreat. Um and that to me is fascinating. I love the amphitheater but for obvious reasons.

[00:06:36]>> [laughter] >> Uh which isn't far away. And but also dig like look into the places that no one's going and the reason that is that all over the Pompeii is so much graffiti. Names, sentences, you know, places. And some of it's very funny. And then you see these like children's drawings. They would draw on the walls, they would draw the games they played or or outlines of their hands just like children do now on paper. And for me that's when like that's when it comes to life. You think 2,000 years ago there was a child drawing the outline of his or her hand just like our children do.

[00:07:14]And you feel so connected to the past in a very real, very alive way. Um that's my recommendation.

[00:07:22]>> Brilliant. Thank you so much.

[00:07:23]>> Thank you, Kevin.

[00:07:24]>> Great podcast.

[00:07:24]>> Thanks for being here.