Issue 22: Tom Hiddleston Deals With the Summer of Hiddleswift

Tom, Taylor, Taffy, and that tank-top…

Whenever I ask for suggestions of profiles or interviews to cover on the Gossip Reading Club, the GQ piece on Tom Hiddleston is always one of the most requested. And for good reason: it was a very revealing article that saw a popular actor in the aftermath of a high-profile relationship trying to navigate a weird period in his life and being, let’s be honest, a little cringe about it. I remember how viral this piece went, how everyone had an opinion about it. Even today, when you ask people about it, especially Hiddleston fans, feelings are intense. Some feel it was too mean. Others think it came close to torpedoing the actor’s career. For me, I think it’s a funny, raw, and maybe too revealing profile that shows an earnest figure figuring out what the world wants from him.

GQ. "Tom Hiddleston on Taylor Swift, Heartbreak, and Great Bolognese." February 14, 2017. Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

(Image via GQ.)

It was 2016. The Summer of Hiddleswift. The Sun got “exclusive” photographs of Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston cozying up by the sea, and the internet went wild. At the time, Swift has only just split up from her most recent boyfriend, DJ Calvin Harris, and rumours swirled that there may have been some romantic overlap between the Scottish producer and the English actor. Things seemed to get very serious very quickly. Taylor met Tom’s mother (she does love a mother-in-law.) They did some pap walks. It culminated in a fourth of July celebration at Swift’s home, featuring a variety of celebrities, but what everyone remembers is the tank top.

There was just something about seeing Hiddleston in that I Heart TS shirt (with temporary tattoo on his arm) that made the entire endeavour seem, let’s be honest, hilarious. Everyone laughed at it. alas, the great love of our time did not last, and Swift later moved onto Joe Alwyn, with whom she remained for six years in relative privacy until the explosion that was TNT. Tom, in the meantime, entered a weird period in his career. It wasn’t outright backlash. That would be too grand a term. It was more that people just thought he was a bit cringe.

That’s where Taffy Brodesser-Akner, ever the queen of the modern celebrity profile, found Hiddleston when she profiled him for GQ the following year. He’s still beloved (those Hiddleston fans are fiercely devoted), and hardly unemployable, but if you started to feel like his moment had passed by February 2017, nobody would have blamed you.

Akner has always been good at approaching her subjects with enthusiasm and a sharp scalpel. She has a surgical eye but a warm gaze. Consider her Bradley Cooper profile where she is empathetic about his hesitation to open up for an interview but also aware of the unofficial contract between subject and interviewer. My favourite piece of hers, about Britney Spears’ Vegas residency, understood the protective aura fans projected onto Spears while contextualizing it as part of the celebrity industrial complex that ruined her only a few years prior. She’s not disdainful of celebrity or the oft-fluffy nature of being in this weird bubble of fame and neuroses. Rather, Akner knows that the ways this ecosystem changes the psyche are fascinating. That’s not to say she’s pulling her punches. If anyone is good at giving her subjects just enough rope to hang themselves with, it’s Taffy.

(It’s a good photoshoot! Image via GQ.)

This takes shape in her Hiddleston piece by her trying to evoke the golden Labrador enthusiasm of her subject. There are a lot of exclamation points here to let the reader know that Tom is on! Her intro: His excitement over his spaghetti Bolognese recipe! Apparently, his recipe is excellent, and I do love a goo spaghetti dish so I would like to try it, thank you very much. Hiddleston seems like an eager host, and a willing interview subject. Taffy captures his giddiness over practically everything. The film Moonlight is "as amazing! and riveting! and touching! as everyone has said." Practically every person he's met or worked with is "extraordinary!" or "amazing!" or "radiates joy!" Even his porridge recipe has him "obsessed!" As Akner puts it, "his zeal is bottomless. It’s one of many things that, were it not for what we know about his personal life, we might already know more about."

Therein is her thesis: the real Hiddleston is obscured by the one who's been filling up front pages and Twitter replies. It’s a fair and rather bogstandard line for a celebrity profile. They’re normal people whose public images are different from their private ones. So we get Akner trying to capture the eagerness of Hiddleston, but it does end up reading as kind of mocking at times. This might just be a writer thing, but you’re told to pull back on using too many exclamation points for a reason. After a while, it feels tedious, like someone is yelling at you. I don’t think Hiddleston was bellowing in Akner’s face or anything, but her trying to recreate his chipper nature is tough in someone else’s voice.

It is that earnestness that seemed to make people turn against Hiddleston, if only for a little while (and, let’s be honest, nowhere near as brutally as would have happened were he a woman.) The Hiddleswift fervour was heightened by his Golden Globes acceptance speech, wherein he talked about his work for UNICEF and made it sound like his glorious acting was helping the downtrodden activists of the world. Again, his earnestness was evident, but in execution in that moment, what he was going for didn’t land. The crowd’s seeming reactions of cynicism and “huh, okay” just made the moment funnier and more memeable. It was no Adrien Brody ramble, more a genuine muddle of words and ideas, but hey, in that moment, he was still very easy to mock.

As Taffy put it: "Tom Hiddleston’s sincerity and eagerness to engage, to connect, go from making a confounding first impression to a genuinely winning second one. On every level, Hiddleston is in: He’s there, he’s present, he’s yours, he’s heartfelt, he’s real. And that can be a double-edged Chitauri Scepter, since it leads to the stuff about Hiddleston that wounds him."

Putting yourself out there hurts, more so when it happened because of your love life. Power couples are irresistible to the masses but it doesn’t take much for that to slide into overkill. Certainly, this is something Swift is familiar with. Being an Internet Boyfriend, I imagine that Hiddleston’s had at least a few conversations about the matter. He’s a cute tall white boy with talent, curly hair, ties to a major IP, and an urge to please: of course he has legions of obsessive female fans. I know SO many people with crushes on him. With that comes, let’s be honest, the crazies. And plenty of people had Feelings about Hiddleswift.

(Ryan Reynolds was going through it. Image via Instagram.)

Why were they seen as instantly mockable? Because it should have worked, right? Pop princess plus Loki; the brutally honest singer-songwriter of feminine emotion and the well-bred thespian with high appeal to the ladies. But it all seemed too full-on, too orchestrated, especially since Swift had only just split from Harris and he was the rare Taytay ex who didn’t keep his mouth shut about it all. If you’re trying to distract from your ex, going all in on the new guy is one way to do it.

I continue to see a lot of Hiddleston fans describe this piece as a hit-job, which I’ve never agreed with. Is there an acidic element to Taffy's approach? Yeah, but she's also working with a guy who, let's be honest, couldn't help but dig his own grave with this piece. You can feel his concern about how he's presenting himself emanating from the screen. The shadow of Hiddleswift is looming overhead, as is that Golden Globes speech that inspired so many memes. It’s easy to infantilize this kind of guy, and stan culture’s most parasocial elements love to reduce their famous faves to useless little puppets for their personal pleasure (see the women who are super weird about Hiddleston’s love life, or that of any man crowned an Internet Boyfriend.)

It was also very easy to position Swift as the conniving fame-seeker and Hiddleston as some ignorant chump who had no idea the cameras were watching. Come on, guys, he’s no slouch at this. I remember when that terrible Hank Williams biopic he was in was being hyped with totally coincidental rumours that Hiddleston was dating his co-star Elisabeth Olson. He’s very good at being famous. That doesn’t happen without care or planning. Maybe he didn’t expect the romance to become a joke or to be the subject of intense scrutiny as Swift is used to, but I have trouble buying that he was all by-golly-gosh about it. That doesn’t make his earnestness in this interview fake, of course. I do buy that he was burned by the fallout. Who wouldn’t be?

If there’s one thing you can be certain about with Hiddleston after reading this piece, it’s that he does not want to be misunderstood. He will ensure that you know what’s going on, even if he has to all but chase Akner up to assert it. This is probably the part of the profile that most people remember, and we’ll get to it soon. But largely, Akner wants people to like Hiddleston. She feels for him and his plight, and she doesn’t want to kick down a guy who is ultimately a sweetheart.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of cringe lately. For certain people, it does seem to be the absolute worst thing you could be called, which fascinates me as someone who is extremely earnest and uncool in my own life. It’s a very easy way to shut someone up, to deem them irrelevant to the ongoing conversation or matter at hand. Oh, you’re cringe. What you said or did was just embarrassing. How is it defined? That seems to be an amorphous concept. With Hiddleston, that tank-top was cringe. Him being a theatre kid was cringe. Him doing impressions of Robert De Niro in front of Robert De Niro was cringe. The Golden Globes speech was cringe. That was the narrative. He’s trying too hard. He cares too much. In the context of 2025, it seems like such small fry, especially since “cringe” has become so heavily politicized.

I all too often see people caring about political causes being derided as cringe, especially on issues like LGBTQ+ activism or calling out of bigoted insults (seriously, why are right-wingers so effing obsessed with the R word?) When Elon Musk said that empathy was a bad quality for humanity to possess, he might as well have said it was cringe to him. That’s what the term is used for nowadays: to lambast those who dare to care and don’t find callousness entertaining. It’s the new version of “lol are you triggered?” Yeah, yeah, I know I’m probably stretching a bit to connect the Summer of Hiddleswift to Elon effing Musk, but I’m so tired of this rigmarole. Frankly, I want more sincere people.

And I think Taffy had a similar stance with this piece, as much as she leaves the door open for ridicule of her subject. She describes him as "an English gentleman of the purest caliber who has never spoken out of turn about any of his relationships, who roots for his co-stars and colleagues loudly (really loudly) over social media, who has never been caught flipping the bird at the paparazzi who hunted him after his famous breakup, who wouldn’t curse during my many hours with him no matter what the circumstance because his mother would be so disappointed to read it." And there’s truth to that. His industry reputation is good. You don’t hear about him having drama with co-stars. You wouldn’t blame him if he mouthed off at a photographer or asserted his boundaries but he keeps his cool. Well, not that cool.

Taffy is pro-uncool. She calls Hiddleston uncool but not as a slam. What’s wrong with a guy who loves his mum, works hard at his job, and enjoys Heat (solid movie choice)? Being kind and open has its perks, but when you’re in the aftermath of a breakup that’s had you labelled as a bit embarrassing and you don’t know how to deal with that, what can you do?

(Image via Twitter.)

He’s trying so dang hard and it’s got that flop sweat sheen all over it, but haven’t we all been there? Honestly, I did laugh rereading this piece. I did wince at some of Hiddleston’s earnestness and overt eagerness, especially as he all but chased Akner down to let him knew that he’s totally okay, right?! For a chunk of this piece, I was in a perpetual state of “oh honey, no.”

He frames pushing back against false press narratives as "the lesson of 2016 [is] we have to love more, we have to risk more, we have to be braver, we have to be more outspoken.” It sounds very dramatic, in and out of context, especially since what we're discussing is a summer fling and a bad tank top. Akner acknowledges how Hiddleswift seemed like it "was cooked up in a panicked publicist’s office" but also that it's not hard to imagine "beautiful people fall[ing] in love." But she has to ask him if the romance was real. “Taylor is an amazing woman,” reads the prepared statement Tom Hiddleston has memorized and is now giving me at The Bull & Last, where his voice has gone low. “She’s generous and kind and lovely, and we had the best time.” But I didn’t ask that, I say. I asked something else. So I wait, and he says, “Of course it was real.” And the tank top? "It was a joke [...] among friends."

It is tempting to say, “dude, it’s not that serious” about how Hiddleswift was covered. Yeah, people mocked it but it was a mockable thing, and it’s relatively low on the list of offences a celebrity could commit. Then again, who wants people to laugh at their other half, even if it was only a short romance? That Hiddleston says “Taylor” and is effusive in his compliments does suggest that he felt strongly for her. Maybe he got burned by the breakup as well as the tank top drama. Perhaps he doesn’t want Swifties to murder him.

Clearly it’s affected him because he keeps talking about it, to the point where Akner intervenes:

"He still isn’t looking at me. The last piece of my steak is now poised on his fork in mid-air. He is so sad, and I can’t take it anymore, so I put my hand on his and I say, “Tom, Tom, it’s okay. You don’t have to talk about the tank top anymore. I got it. I understand. I’ll tell the world.”

But he can’t stop talking about it. He literally cannot stop talking about it. “I don’t know,” he says. “I just, I was surprised. I was just surprised that it got so much attention. The tank top became an emblem of this thing.” It’s hard to tell me this, he says. He wants to trust me. He wants to trust that the world won’t use this to embarrass him again, but he doesn’t know. He just knows it will follow him until he talks about it."

This was where I first went, “oh no, please stop.” It’s too much! So earnest! Taffy wants you to be okay! Don’t dig the hole even deeper! But again, is he wrong? Because the world did read this profile and think it was all way too dramatic, even though, as Akner notes, "Everywhere he went, whether it was checking e-mail on a park bench or looking at a menu, if he furrowed his brow it meant he was miserable and that would incite a new tabloid story about how hard he was taking all of this." While writing the piece, Akner became the next rumoured girlfriend of Hiddleston thanks to a Daily Mail article. If a man stands next to a woman, they have to be dating. That’s the paparazzi law.

Would it have been better for him if he had just said “no comment?” Probably, but that’s my advice for most things, and if everyone followed it, I wouldn’t have this newsletter.

The piece ends with Akner, ready to leave London, receiving an email from Tom asking for a quick rendezvous. He wants to reiterate his feelings on the Hiddleswift story and how he can't let rumours drag his life down “because you have to fight for love. You can’t live in fear of what people might say. You know, you have to be true to yourself.” Akner gets all of that, and feels she understood him perfectly well the day before. "Tom. I have a flight to catch. And he shakes his head, feeling foolish because maybe there was something he thought he could say that wasn’t quite coming out the right way, and instead he says, “Yeah, okay, I just wanted to make sure.”"

But they do talk, although Akner keeps her tape recorder off. "He carries my luggage downstairs for me and I get into a cab for the airport, and I think about sincerity and I think about snideness and I wonder why so many of us seem so much more comfortable with snideness." And it ends with an invocation of the Queen and David Bowie song "Under Pressure." "This is our last dance, this is our last dance, this is ourselves. You should’ve seen his face when he was saying these words. His eyes were closed, and it was like he was in a trance. It was the best face!"

This article, as you probably remember, got a lot of traction. It was cited, along with the Hiddleswift summer and Golden Globes speech, as a much-rumoured reason why Hiddleston lost out on the James Bond gig. I don’t believe this rumour for a second. Every white British male gets Bond buzz for at least one week of their career and it was just Tom’s turn. I highly doubt the Broccoli clan would have ditched him, had he truly been shortlisted, because of this. Frankly, I bet the Bond franchise, now under the iron thumb of Amazon, would kill to get Hiddleston on board (I’m rooting for Dev Patel or Jamie Bell, personally.)

Of course, Hiddleston is doing just fine. He’s still Loki. He just finished an acclaimed West End run of Much Ado About Nothing. His next film, The Life of Chuck, won the Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, which is usually a sign of impending Oscar success, so I’m fascinated to see how that unfolds. And he’s a dad now, having had a son with his fiancé Zawe Ashton (Vod from Fresh Meat!) The pair of them work together and do plenty of red carpet appearances but otherwise maintain their privacy. We don’t even know the name of their kid. I don’t blame him for wanting to keep a tight hold on such things, especially post-Hiddleswift. Well, that and also because some of his so-called fans are total creeps who have been hugely sexist and racist towards Ashton. It’s, sadly, no surprise that they’ve been subjected to many of the same conspiratorial rantings that have plagued his friend, Benedict Cumberbatch. I wonder if they ever talk about it.

And Taylor Swift, is, of course, still Taylor Swift. She’s in her most public relationship yet, with a very famous guy in a different field of celebrity who is as eager to be in the spotlight as she is, I wrote for The Daily Beast that this is maybe the first power couple pairing she’s been in, although I do wonder if Hiddleswift also counts, despite its briefness. I feel like he would have leaned all the way in on them being a big showy deal had it lasted. Did the tank top end it? At least she got a solid song out of it (that’s what my Swiftie friends say. I’m not a good judge of her music. I did like “Style,” though.)

Nobody is immune to backlash. You could set your watch to the timing of a celebrity going from being universally beloved to the subject of claims that they’re overexposed through no fault of their own. Every time a new star emerges and the internet heralds them as the person of the moment, I think about how those same qualities they love will be used against them in less than a year. But you can survive it. Hiddleston did. Granted, he’s a nice white guy who didn’t commit any heinous crimes and wasn’t “annoying”, which is apparently the worst crime any famous woman can commit. The Hiddleston profile sticks in our imaginations because it shows someone being open (maybe a bit too open) about how much it sucks to go through that process and how talking about it is an unwinnable process. All you can really do is ride it out. And be Loki. That helps.

(Image via Giphy.)

Thanks for reading. You can find my work scattered across the internet. Over on Pajiba, I wrote about The Rock’s Oscar hopes with The Smashing Machine, Walton Goggins entering his Thirst Trap era, and why we need a David Cronenberg Summer. I paid tribute to L.J. Smith, author of The Vampire Diaries, for Paste. I wrote about one of my favourite films, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, for Crooked Marquee. I reviewed the disappointing final season of You for TheWrap.

I got a big influx of new subscribers from my piece on Vanity Fair’s ingénues of 2003, so thanks for that. If you’d enjoy more pieces like that in the future, please let me know!

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