Going Ape

Tom Hiddleston Has Faced Off Against Contingents of Comic Book Superheroes. But King Kong? That’s Something Else Altogether. The British Actor Shares H Is Experience on Filming the Jungle Adventure Kong: Skull Island Opening This Week.

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The producers of the 2014 Godzilla have reimagined the origins of another classic monster myth. And Kong: Skull Island opening this week is equally an original creature horror and a combat drama, set, as it is, in the early ’70s during the tail end of the Vietnam War, when a diverse team of explorers are brought together to venture into an uncharted island in the Pacific, unaware that they're crossing into the domain of King Kong.

Tom Hiddleston stars as pro tracker James Conrad, a disillusioned British SAS veteran of the war, leading the expedition. Brie Larson is photojournalist Mason Weaver. And Samuel L Jackson is the jungle-hardened trigger-happy United States Army Lieutenant Colonel Preston Packard, bringing to bear a state-of-the-art arsenal with which to destroy Kong in the ultimate battle between man and nature.

The English actor Hiddleston, 36 is most familiar to multiplex audiences as Thor’s villainous brother Loki in Marvel Studios’ The Avengers series, a signature character he will reprise for Thor: Ragnarok in November and the 2018 Avengers: Infinity War and its 2019 sequel. Which makes Kong: Skull Island something of a Marvel Cinematic Universe reunion with Jackson, who has his own recurring role as SHIELD director Nick Fury.

Yet, even for this 36-year-old blockbuster veteran, Kong: Skull Island, with its six-month filming on locations spanning three continents in Hawaii, Australia and Vietnam, was a behemoth undertaking. And playing Conrad demanded acting skills no less than his three-time Golden Globe-winning performance in the acclaimed BBC television spy serial The Night Manager.