Tom Hiddleston is holding court in the center of an ancient city, determined to solve a centuries-old mystery. An epic cataclysm happened here almost 2,000 years ago, but as the sun sets on Pompeii in 2026, the actor scans the ruins and asks those of us assembled around him to cast our senses back to the Roman port city’s last day on August 24, A.D. 79. That’s when Mount Vesuvius, the gently sloping green ridge on the horizon, rained hellfire down on the people who lived here.
Actually, Hiddleston wants to push our group backward just a little more, to right before the volcanic eruption. Pompeii has been the actor’s secret passion for decades, forged when he first visited here at age 17. Now he has turned that fascination into the inventive new NatGeo documentary series Pompeii: Out of Time, which explores the ancient disaster as a combination true-crime thriller and time-travel story. The unresolved question: Who, if anyone, was able to survive that day of fire and brimstone? The show is also heavily influenced by Loki, his beloved trickster god from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, who’s notorious for hopscotching through timelines.
Like Loki himself, Hiddleston guides our small group through the ages with a flick of his wrists. (The Englishman talks as expressively with his hands as any native Italian.) “What’s so illuminating about a site like Pompeii is that you come here and you feel 2,000 years compress and collapse,” Hiddleston tells us. “There’s bread baking in the oven, and there are children’s cradles, and a marketplace where people sold fruit and fish. They had farmers, and their children were drawing on the walls, and you think: these people were just like us.”
Except … not always. He is standing, after all, in the Santuario di Apollo before a white marble altar topped with a flat black slab of lava stone—which withstood the heat of their fiery open-air animal incinerations. “Then you come into the Temple of Apollo and understand the ritual around their religion is sacrificing animals to a pantheon,” Hiddleston goes on, wincing slightly. “And in so many ways they were not like us.”
Pompeii: Out of Time aims to bridge that chronological gap in a playful and clever way while still sticking to the facts that have been literally unearthed by scholars.
A Tour Guide into the Past
Esquire visited the actual site with Hiddleston last week when the National Geographic Channel brought together a small group of journalists, authors, and online creators to showcase the series, which debuts July 22 on the channel and streams on Disney+ the next day.
People the world over already know about the volcano that turned this community on the Bay of Naples into a time capsule by sealing it beneath ash and rock. It forever preserved the ancient Roman way of life while ending the lives of those who were living it. Hiddleston wanted to bring viewers up close to the victims (and possible survivors) by connecting us person to person.
“I didn’t want to stand in a fixed position in front of a camera telling you a story that I feel you already knew,” Hiddleston says. In the show, the actor snaps back and forth between now and then to explore what happened with three different individuals who lived in Pompeii when it was destroyed: a young boy who worked for a blacksmith, a businesswoman who owned a prominent bathhouse, and a Praetorian guard stationed in nearby Herculaneum. What did they do when the apocalypse was surging toward them?
“It was fascinating to me as somebody who’s, I guess, a professional student of meaning and motivation. That’s the actor’s cliche: ‘What’s my motivation?’ ” Hiddleston explains. “Why do you make the choices you make? [I wanted] to examine ordinary people in the course of that day, ordinary people who would never have expected to be studied 2,000 years later. They didn’t live their lives like emperors or generals or consuls or writers. To trace and track their choices and their movements felt very much like a very emotional, suspenseful thriller.”
The series blends dramatic re-creation, speculation, and documentation as Hiddleston turns to experts in search of what may have happened to these real-life figures. Among the specialists was archaeologist Darius Arya, who has spent nearly two decades excavating ancient Roman sites and accompanied Hiddleston on our private sunset tour of the ruins.
“This program really does jump into the reality of the archeologist, because there’s a lot of fantasy, there’s a lot of imagination, there’s a lot of testing of hypotheses,” Arya told us. “This is what’s needed in the field, because it can engage a lot of people. I talk a lot about empathy. It stirs the pot a little bit for the viewer, for the kid, for the tourist that’s going to Pompeii. This can engage them to dig deeper.”
Hiddleston visited the southern Italian ruins when he was only 17.
The Marvel Connection
Hiddleston wove a lot of his trickster god from the MCU into Pompeii: Out of Time. He collaborated on the documentary with Kevin R. Wright, who produced the Loki series for Disney+, which saw the one-time villain (or two-time, or maybe three—but hey, who’s counting?) venturing through the Sacred Timeline trying to set things right that once went wrong.
Given that NatGeo and Marvel Studios are part of the Disney umbrella, it was no problem to blend the two. “They were very encouraging, actually,” Hiddleston says, acknowledging “the strength of the association that people have with me and Loki.” In our sit-down interview in Pompeii’s central forum, we joked that this is because Hiddleston has the same evil streak.
“Exactly. It’s very easy to see,” he joked. “There’s no difference between me and him.”
The Pompeii doc features several Marvel Easter eggs, like lines lifted directly from the Thor movies, and as it unfolds and hits various dead ends or mistaken assumptions, Hiddleston lifts his finger in the shape of a Loki L to pause, rewind, or fast-forward as he and the scholars follow the available evidence to find the truth. “It seemed like a very playful way to acknowledge that kind of cinematic language that we’d slightly invented for ourselves,” Hiddleston says. “And not to use it … it felt like it was a gift, right?”
Before he became an actor, Hiddleston studied the ancient world and earned a classics degree from Cambridge University, which he pursued in part because of his fascination with Pompeii. This interest was sparked when he was only 17 and visited the southern Italian ruins like many students from the UK, where it’s practically a rite of passage.
“It’s very vivid in my memory, especially now,” he told me. “It was my first trip away with no adult supervision. So no teachers, no parents, no grown-ups. It was just me and two friends.” That was July 1998, he said, almost 26 years to the day that we were speaking.
“We climbed up Vesuvius,” Hiddleston recalled. “Then we came down here, and I don’t quite know what I was expecting. I’d seen Roman ruins in the UK, which are not expansive—a wall or a well or whatever. And I walked in here and it was an entire town, perfectly preserved in the detail that you see it. These buildings are almost completely intact, and it hit me so profoundly. It felt like time travel. I felt like I was suddenly walking into the past.”
He says he was never the same. “It brought it all to life for me. And then it changed and transformed my life.”
It’s no accident that Loki himself visits Pompeii in the official Marvel timeline. In the first season of the Marvel series, he and Owen Wilson’s Time Variance Authority agent Mobius go to the doomed city on the day of the eruption to test the theory that cataclysms are ideal hideouts for time-traveling disruptors: There will be no witnesses.
“I remember talking about it really early on with Michael Waldron, who created Loki and was the head writer on that show,” Hiddleston says. “He had this fantastic theory that … a volcanic eruption, a tsunami, a flood, and any natural disaster would be a perfect place to hide because whatever you do isn’t going to change history. As soon as I heard that, I said, ‘We have to go to Pompeii. We have to open a time door and walk through. I would love to do that.’ ”
He proposed that his own history with ancient languages could be called into service. “I told him that I’d read classics at university. I thought it’d be fun if Loki spoke Latin and tried to address all the Pompeians in Latin, and they’d be looking [confused] at this being from the future with long black hair and a tie.”
They didn’t do that on the actual location, of course. Pompeii looked very different before Vesuvius sealed it inside a scalding time capsule. But even so, Hiddleston loved visiting the Hollywood version that re-created the way it once was. “I remember that day on set and I had this giddiness,” he says. “It just seemed like a perfect confluence of all my passions and interests.”
That love for it is still here as the sun goes down and Hiddleston and Arya lead our group through the forum in front of the Temple of Jupiter, which the actor notes had been closed due to damage from an earthquake in A.D. 62. That temblor, a dozen years before the eruption, prophetically foreshadowed the destruction to come.
“They sort of powered the temple down,” he told me, adding with Loki-like amused menace: “Don’t anger the gods, though…”
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