Why Tom Hiddleston can’t stop thinking about Pompeii

It’s been nearly 2,000 years since the late summer day in A.D. 79 when Mount Vesuvius, looming over the Bay of Naples in southern Italy, sent a surge of superheated gas, ash, and rock down its slopes and into the Roman towns below. The disaster left cities like Pompeii and Herculaneum frozen in time—and all these centuries later, contemporary archaeologists and historians are still captivated by the window they provide into the past.

National Geographic’s new three-part series Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston blends scripted drama and documentary storytelling to shed light on some of the new insights that researchers are gleaning into ancient Roman life. The show is hosted by award-winning actor Tom Hiddleston, also an executive producer on the series, who studied classics at the University of Cambridge before launching his acting career. Fascinated by Pompeii from an early age, Hiddleston returns to the devastated city to trace the stories of three real-life residents on what became the worst day of their lives: a teenage apprentice blacksmith, an influential businesswoman, and a soldier who belonged to the legendary Praetorian Guard.

Guided by a team of experts—and with help from some cutting-edge technology—Hiddleston takes viewers on a journey alongside these characters forgotten by history, revealing how their stories complicate the familiar narrative of Pompeii’s last hours. National Geographic spoke with Hiddleston about his journey into the past—and about what the story of Pompeii means for us today.

(Read our cover story on how AI is rewriting the story of Mount Vesuvius—and the towns it buried.)

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

National Geographic: How do you explain what it is about the ancient Roman Empire you’ve found so compelling for so long?

Tom Hiddleston: I started learning Latin in school at the age of 10. I’ll be honest with you: Academically, I hadn’t been particularly brilliant or noteworthy in anything until that point. We started learning Latin, and I can’t explain it—I just understood it. And I loved the stories. I’d always loved the Greek myths growing up. Odysseus, Theseus and the Minotaur, Perseus, Medusa, Jason and the Argonauts, Hercules. It was an endless source of curiosity and interest.

I couldn’t have articulated it when I was in my teens, but the thing I loved most was that I understood that the ancient world—ancient Greece and Rome, in their infinite variety, from fifth-century Athens to the fall of the Roman Empire—everything that happens in this period are the cornerstones of Western civilization. How we speak, how we create, how we think. The foundations of politics, democracy, culture, architecture, art, military history, naval strategy. Everything is traceable back to ancient Rome and ancient Greece.

Of course, it goes through the Renaissance and through Elizabethan England—all of those extraordinary intellects, those great writers, Shakespeare and the Founding Fathers of America, they were all eminent classicists. And all over the world are archaeological sites, like Pompeii, where you can visit the ancient world as a living, breathing place.

Why return to Pompeii? What’s the allure of that city and that moment for you—and for everyone, really?

We tell stories about the past to understand something about our present, and somewhere like Pompeii is a gateway where the 2,000 years that exist between us and the past compress. So it all feels like it happened yesterday, and the reason I love it so much is I realize that human beings haven’t changed at all. Of course, our technologies have changed, and the way we communicate, and various kinds of systems. But the primary elements of the experience of being alive are the same. We still have the same questions—philosophical questions, existential questions—about what it means to be part of a political community, what it means to be alive and to be mortal on this Earth. They were fascinated by those questions, and we still are. Any reading of the ancient world only enlivens one’s imagination, and personally, it makes me feel less alone in the world to know that they were thinking about the same things.

That relatability between us and ancient Romans really comes out in the series through its dramatization of the lives of everyday people. Why was that approach important?

That’s what I find so moving. On that fateful day when Mount Vesuvius erupts, there were ordinary people going about their daily routine. I suppose the goal is to invite the audience to empathize with those people. Here’s this kid who is just at the beginning of his life, and he’s got his first job. He’s trying to make his mother proud, and they’ve fallen on hard times, and it’s not easy for him. You have this businesswoman who is in a position of responsibility—then to see that when the eruption happens, she has all these clients who she’s responsible for, and her first thought is for their safety and security. And then the soldier, who is on leave in an upmarket resort town, Herculaneum, but he’s got the perfect training. He’s the right man in the wrong place at the wrong time, but his training could be implemented to help get people into the boats and off the beach.

That’s what Pompeii evokes for me. It’s not about the statues of the high-status figures, the generals and the consuls and the emperors. The plaster casts [of victims of the eruption, made by archaeologists] are ordinary people. Fathers and mothers and children and teachers and uncles and the family dog.

You talk about empathy and imagination a lot in the series, and you are so transparent about the fact that you’re imagining aspects of these people’s lives. What led you to make this decision? Did it feel risky?

It feels like what I have always done. It feels like what I do as an actor, as somebody who engages in storytelling and inhabits characters for a living. Some of those characters are fictional, and some of those characters are real. I’ve played real people: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hank Williams, Edmund Hillary. What I’m always trying to do is to ground the characterization in something honest. But after a while, you’ve read every book, you’ve read every biography, you’ve listened to every interview, and there are certain moments when you think, well, I have to step into the shoes of this person, and I don’t know what they were thinking about when they were doing this, and I’m going to have to make a choice about whether this person was feeling confident or frightened, because the interest lies in what happens in the private self of a human being.

What was the biggest surprise you took away from making the show?

I had always presumed that the volcano erupts, the city is buried, and there was nothing they could do—that these inhabitants of Pompeii were shocked and surprised by a once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-a-millennium event. Then we started to do the research, and I realized they had much more time. And because of the sophistication of the evidence, and because of people like Professor Steven Tuck who have created databases and written books about the different inscriptions, you realize that people got out. Not everyone was buried by the pyroclastic surge. In the wake of the disaster, [there was] a full-scale humanitarian crisis, where you have hundreds, if not thousands, of refugees who are fleeing Pompeii and fleeing this natural disaster and looking for a new home. And they’re all traumatized and probably need medical attention.

That’s a very resonant, contemporary image. I hope it’s one that inspires great reserves of empathy, which is to say that what happened in Pompeii is no different from a contemporary earthquake or a natural disaster. What’s moving is the evidence of a collective effort: People helped each other in times of crisis. And, hopefully, we feel less alone in the universe, because back then, they did the same thing.