A creeping sense of dread washed over Tom Hiddleston as he read the script for “The Life of Chuck.” He knew that its director, Mike Flanagan, wanted him to play Chuck Krantz, or, as the actor put it, “a harbinger of the apocalypse.”
But as he read on, there came excitement, a thrill. Chuck has a secret: He loves to dance.
Hiddleston, 44, loves to dance, too, a discovery he made when he was a teenager. “It was instinctive,” he said in a recent interview via video. “But it was only for me. I didn’t train, I wasn’t in dance classes.”
He went out dancing with friends. The 1990s were his time. “My love for Daft Punk,” he said of the electronic music duo, “is enduring and real.”
While he is foremost an actor, Hiddleston has become something of a dance ambassador. Lean and elegant, he has the air of Fred Astaire. His limbs are long, but they don’t slow him down; his feet are fast and accurate. Known for his spontaneous eruptions of dance joy — on talk shows and the red carpet — Hiddleston is a natural with rhythmic acuity and, at times, riveting attack. His dancing, whether smooth or sharp, is instinctive and shaped by coordinated fluency.
What’s apparent is the pleasure he gets from it: Certainly, there is Hiddleston the man, but also discernible is the boy within. There is innocence and fearlessness in his love of motion. An avid runner, Hiddleston said, “I’ve always thought of running as dancing forward.”
There’s no faking of abandon. “Tom dives into movement, and he’s not afraid,” the “Chuck” choreographer Mandy Moore said. “It’s like heart first, head second. He is a very smart mover, and he does think about where his body is in space. It comes across that he is not thinking about it — that it just comes from feeling.”
The dance in “Chuck” is long and complex — it lasts around six minutes — but Hiddleston performs it as though he’s making it up on the spot. As he read the script, he envisioned it as an explosion of emotion. “I just wanted it to fly, “ he said. “I wanted it to be the most vital and dynamic expression of joy and movement and freedom that it could be.”
In the film, Chuck is a mystery at first, appearing on billboards that read, “Thanks, Chuck!” accompanied by a photo and “39 GREAT YEARS.”
The story, mirroring the structure of the Stephen King novella on which it’s based, unfolds in three acts that travel backward in time. In the first, when the billboards appear, the planet is on the brink of extinction. Gradually it becomes clear that Chuck isn’t well.
When the dance happens in the second act, Chuck, a businessman, is on a walk. He hears the beat of a drum played by a busker (Taylor Gordon). Instead of continuing on, he halts, dropping his briefcase. His hips give a soft, subtle sway. With two raised fingers, he wags them to the beat and takes a few steps back before stopping on a dime, switching direction and dashing off a quick pirouette.
It’s so unexpected that what follows is a beat of silence and stillness — a prelude to the dance, which, Hiddleston said, is “the last truly alive moment of Chuck’s life before his illness takes hold.”
“This is a moment of defying gravity,” he added.
And defying, for a few minutes, his fate. The number seems like a spontaneous release, but as we learn in Act 3, it dates to Chuck’s early years learning dances in the kitchen with his grandmother. As she cooked, she taught him jazz, swing, salsa, samba, Bossa nova, polka — styles that Hiddleston glides through in his dance.
He slips in a moonwalk, too. And there are signatures from his own dancing — things, Hiddleston said, his family would recognize, like a kind of shuffle. “My body just wants to do it, and I don’t know where it comes from,” he said. “My legs fly out from underneath me. And then I cross and they fly out and cross again.”
In the film, the dance draws a crowd, as all good street performances do. Janice (Annalise Basso), a young woman who happens upon the scene, is swept into the choreography as Chuck’s partner, and together, they fly. But during much of the duet’s creation, they weren’t even in the same room together.
Hiddleston was in London, and Moore and Basso were in Los Angeles. With the help of an associate, Moore started a training program with him, she said, “to work on the basics of jazz, some ballroom techniques, cha-cha, some salsa, a little bit of old school jazz just to see how his body moves.”
She choreographed by sending videotapes of movement phrases, but it wasn’t until they got in a studio together in London that the dance could be shaped and refined. “It was such a space of freedom and exploration,” he said. “Mandy believes so powerfully in the transformative power of dancing. And I felt so safe with her. She said, ‘You’re playing Chuck, but Chuck is you.’”
In many ways, that’s the key to his effervescent performance: You see the person inside of the dancer. In Hiddleston’s case, it’s the clarity of his connection with Basso and Gordon — really, the number is a pas de trois — and his delight as he finds his flow. By the end of the shoot, which took place in the Alabama heat, holes had burned into the soles of his shoes.
“I’m only approximating what a professional dancer feels, which is like after four days of doing it, I thought there was a kind of economy to it,” he said. “It was like my body was accustomed to the routine, and so there was a sort of precision there that maybe wasn’t there at the beginning. I found it easier to make big extensions and bigger shapes and for it to feel a bit looser without sacrificing the form. As we were coming to the end, I was like, ‘I wish I could do this every day.’”
The dance has a weight to it, which is a shift from some of his most identifiable performances. In 2013, Hiddleston appeared on “Chatty Man,” Alan Carr’s talk show, with two other guests who started rapping. Carr asked Hiddleston if he would do a rap, too. Instead, he offered to dance. “They put some music on, and I just did a little dance, like completely spontaneously,” he said. “I remember my microphone pack fell off from the belt of my trousers.”
He thought nothing of it, but years later, it went viral. In terms of coverage, there was, “an extraordinary energy around it,” he said.
“I actually became a bit self-conscious about it. As if it was something that people kind of wanted me to do.”
Eventually, he got over his discomfort. “Maybe I’ve lost that because I’m getting older,” he said.
And dance has continued to surface in his acting life. Recently he appeared in Jamie Lloyd’s London production of “Much Ado About Nothing” in which the cast dances: “We were doing eight shows a week to these ’90s bangers,” he said happily.
But he knows that the message of “Chuck” — and its dance — is serious: “Its message is, do whatever gives you that feeling of being alive,” he said. “Dance, do math, paint, write, run, play the piano, sing, skateboard, surf, climb mountains, whatever it is that gives you deep joy, that is a transformative force in life. Life is brief and precious, and it needs to be grabbed with both hands. It takes courage to follow the joy and to find it.”
He continued, “For Chuck, it’s dancing. And to some extent, for me, it’s dancing. So dance while you can.”
Gia Kourlas is the dance critic for The Times. She writes reviews, essays and feature articles and works on a range of stories.
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