Quitting popcorn films was Hiddleston's smartest move

‘The Life of Chuck’ is the actor’s first substantial movie role in six years. Louis Chilton examines the career of a man who flirted with mainstream stardom but refused to settle down

- By Louis Chilton

To date, the career of Tom Hiddleston has been defined, largely, by two roles: the one he got, and the one he didn't. The first of these – Loki, the machiavellian god of mischief in Marvel's Thor – was the part that made his name, hoisting him to stardom in the early 2010s. Prim, well-spoken and angularly handsome, Hiddleston quickly became one of the de facto frontrunners to take over from Daniel Craig as the next James Bond.

The part never materialised, and Hiddleston himself seemed to de-materialise: taking what he described as “a moment of consideration”, the London-born thespian retreated from Hollywood almost entirely.

It has, in fact, been eight years since you could last walk into a cinema and watch Hiddleston play anyone other than Loki (if you don’t count 2018’s middling Aardman animation Early Man, to which Hiddleston lent his voice). Not since the pulpy monster movie Kong: Skull Island (2017) has Hiddleston fronted a film, though he did return as Loki in two Avengers movies and the post-credits scene of 2023’s dismal Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

In the interim, he’s been on stage - most recently in a production of Much Ado About Nothing at Drury Lane this year - and on TV, narrating nature documentaries and appearing in Loki on Disney+. Hiddleston’s starring role in the new Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck, meekly tipped as an awards season hopeful, is therefore something of a comeback. But where he goes from here isn’t necessarily clear.

The Life of Chuck lives in the sentimental half of King’s oeuvre - more in the vein of The Green Mile or Stand By Me than of his best-known horror classics, such as The Shining or