Tom Hiddleston on His Dancing in "The Life of Chuck" | Variety Studio at TIFF 2024 - video Dailymotion

Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillian and Director Mike Flanagan sit down at the Variety Studio at TIFF.

Transcript

00:00Tom, you have a big dance sequence. What was the style of dance that was hardest to master and which

00:06came easiest to you? Wow, that's a great question. So yes, as very, very carefully and beautifully

00:14described by Stephen King in the novella, there is a extraordinary moment of joy and spontaneity

00:24as expressed in this dance. And I play Chuck Krantz, and Chuck Krantz seems to all the world

00:32like the accountant that he is. That's his job. And he's on his way to a conference, and

00:42walking along the sidewalk one day, he hears a drummer busking on the street,

00:48and he likes the sound of that drum. And he puts down his briefcase, and he starts to move.

00:55And he begins to remember the other multitudes that he contains, one of which is that he was

01:02taught to dance by his grandmother in his kitchen as a child, and that went on to become something

01:08he did at high school. And then this dance number evolved very spontaneously out of

01:15a connection with the drummer and another young woman who's in the crowd.

01:20And in approaching it with Mike and Annalise Basso, who plays Janice, and Taylor Gordon,

01:26the drummer, and Mandy Moore, our choreographer, we kept thinking, well, Chuck as a young boy

01:33was actually taught so many different styles. He was probably taught jazz and swing and polka

01:39and bossa nova and samba and salsa and cha-cha and quick-step and all of these very technical

01:46dances, none of which I have any training in. So I had to do a kind of six-week fast track.

01:58It's interesting. There are some that came more easily than others. I found I loved dancing

02:04jazz and swing. Bossa nova is a technical thing that took my hips a little minute to

02:13get my head around, if that makes sense. And polka is like a 100-meter sprint. It feels like a

02:22gallop. But that's the thing about all these dances is that if you do them enough, the rhythm

02:29infuses your body and you start to feel the thing within yourself that it looks like. There are

02:36certain really, really kinetic, dynamic dances, and there are dances which are much more soft and

02:42delicate. But the key thing was really the joy. If I didn't quite nail the technique,

02:53it was more about expressing the joy.