"Just like us and not at all" – what Tom Hiddleston wants us to remember about Pompeii

"Just like us and not at all" – what Tom Hiddleston wants us to remember about Pompeii The star of Loki and The Night Manager hosts a retelling of the destruction of Pompeii – one that manages to make one of the most familiar stories in Roman history feel fresh Tom Hiddleston wants to challenge what you think you know about Pompeii. The star of Loki and The Night Manager is in Pompeii ahead of the release of his new National Geographic show on the city’s final 24 hours, which culminated in it being buried under metres upon metres of volcanic debris following the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. It’s a story that many will know – and is perhaps one of the best-known episodes in Roman history. Yet Pompeii: Out of Time gives the tale a slant that, I was surprised to discover, feels fresh in the telling. Historical documentaries with big names attached can have an aura of the performative about them, the talent appearing as a bolt-on to give a popular face to the #SeriousHistory. Not so here. Hiddleston first visited the ruins of Pompeii when he was 17, the culmination of his very first trip abroad; he would go on to gain a double first in classics at the University of Cambridge before being “diverted” (his word) by acting. Returning to those roots, here he picks up the mantle not of presenter but detective (complete with evidence board); the ‘amateur classicist’ trying to piece together a new story with the help of archaeologists, volcanologists and psychologists. “I was taught at university by the great Mary Beard,” Hiddleston told me in an exclusive interview – watch out for the whole thing soon on the HistoryExtra YouTube channel. “And one of the things I remember her saying is, the richness of studying the deep past is that you learn very immediately they were just like us, and in the same breath, they were not like us at all.” This dichotomy stretches through Pompeii: Out of Time. Want to see this content? This page contains content provided by YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as YouTube may use cookies and other technologies. To view this content, choose 'Accept and continue' to allow YouTube and its required purposes. “The story of Pompeii,” a solemn Hiddleston intones in the show’s opener, “is the story of death.” That is the story we know, at least in outline. The eruption. The ash. Day turning to night. The casts of the victims. The statistics bounced around are stark. Some 600 million tonnes of superheated rock and magma spewed forth by Vesuvius. An eruption column that reached 20 miles up into the sky. More thermal energy unleashed than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, with temperatures hot enough to fuse metal to bone. How could anyone survive this? This brings us to one of the great misconceptions of Pompeii: that life here was snuffed out in an instant and the city was ‘frozen in time’, when in fact the cataclysm unfolded over 24 hours. At Herculaneum, some 300 skeletons were found in boatsheds, when the city had an estimated population of 5,000. Likewise, we have around a thousand casts of human remains from Pompeii, a city of at least 10,000. There’s a discrepancy there. “But that isn’t exactly true,” Hiddleston quickly retcons. This is the thread that Pompeii: Out of Time pulls – if there were 24 hours between the start of Vesuvius’s eruption and Pompeii’s entombment, people must have escaped. And Hiddleston hopes to find someone who made it through that awful day. “If you were on the Titanic, you don't know how the story ends, and you're having to make choices,” Hiddleston said at a Q&A following the show’s world premiere in Pompeii. “It’s the same thing if you were in Pompeii in AD 79 – you don't know how the story ends. People do different things, and it seemed to be just so human, so stimulating to think about it.” Thinking about it is what Hiddleston brings to this – he is an actor after all. Most docudramas meld historical fact with reconstructions of things we almost certainly know; Pompeii: Out of Time exists more in the liminal space between evidence and full-on fiction. “Blur the lines a bit, break a few rules, play in the middle” – that was the intent, director Tom Barbor-Might told us in the same Q&A. Certainly, the dramatised sequences are as heartfelt as they are horrifying and harrowing, the disaster feeling as if it might rush out of the screen and envelop you. But the reason they work is that the three figures who these segments centre on were real Romans whom Hiddleston and co have traced in the historical record. In Pompeii, we follow Avianius, a boy apprenticed to a bronzesmith couple, and Julia Felix, a rare example of a Roman businesswoman. And along the coast, giving our point of view for happenings in Herculaneum, an unnamed soldier, possibly a Praetorian guard. Inevitably, imagining what might have happened to real people who can’t speak for themselves results in missteps, and herein the series’ gimmick comes in. From the present, Hiddleston controls the historical timeline, rewinding to an earlier point to allow the scenario to play out differently. If you’ve watched Hiddleston’s time-twisting turn in the Marvel series Loki, this will all feel a bit familiar. You might wonder how dealing in conjecture might go down among those who have spent years painstakingly excavating, cataloguing and interpreting Pompeii. Yet as Darius Arya, one of the archaeologists on the series, told us, the programme captures the reality of archaeology. “There's a lot of fantasy, there's a lot of imagination, and there's a lot of testing of hypotheses, and a lot of it just ends up in the rubbish heap because you realise that that's just the wrong path,” he says. “But that's just the element of the game, and that's what makes it exciting.” What I loved was the series acknowledged one of the lesser-known elements of the Pompeii story – that this day of infamy was followed by a full-blown refugee crisis, something I spoke about with Dr Jess Venner as part of our podcast series on the city of Pompeii (that’s in episode three, but do give the whole series a listen). Such was the scale of the crisis that it drew the attention of Rome, prompting emperor Titus – who had only come to power in June AD 79 – to appoint ex-consuls to coordinate a relief effort, and even send the victims his own money. “What the inhabitants of Pompeii experienced is no different from the many natural disasters people are going through all over the world now,” said Hiddleston. “People encounter extraordinary, immediate difficulty all the time and in different parts of the world. And what moves me is how quickly human beings organise and band together to help each other. And you realise that's exactly what [the people of Pompeii] would have done.” A lot of this comes through anticipating how people might have reacted. Hiddleston likens it to the actor's cliché: “What's my motivation? Why do you make the choices you make?” he asks. “[They were] 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. They were ordinary people who happened to be caught in an extraordinary moment.” These are lives he is trying to capture. Of real people pitted against unimaginable circumstances. It feels appropriate; he is also the God of Stories, after all. Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston premieres on National Geographic on 22 July and begins streaming on Disney+ and Hulu on 23 July Authors Kev Lochun is digital editor (audience and video) at HistoryExtra