Tom Hid­dle­ston: ​“I had to com­mit to Hank’s truth.”

I Saw The Light sees Brit dar­ling Tom Hid­dle­ston break out his south­ern drawl, wrap his tongue around a clutch of coun­try torch songs and don a giant Stet­son as the late, great Hank Williams. The film, by direc­tor Marc Abra­ham, tells of a life fit-to-burst­ing with roman­tic and com­mer­cial highs, and alco­hol-fuelled lows, which ulti­mate­ly led to the star’s pre­ma­ture demise. Eliz­a­beth Olson plays his wife, Audrey, who want­ed her own singing career but was swad­dled with­in Hank’s giant shad­ow. We met Hid­dle­ston at the 2015 Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val where he told us about his con­cep­tion of coun­try music, learn­ing gui­tar and immers­ing him­self in Hank’s crazy world.

LWLies: What is coun­try music to you?

Hid­dle­ston: It’s three chords and the truth. This film all start­ed here in Toron­to. Rod­ney Crow­el came to see me while I was shoot­ing Crim­son Peak on his way to a wed­ding in New York and myself and Rod­ney and direc­tor Mark Abra­ham spent a week­end togeth­er. I asked him: ​‘Give me some instruc­tion. I’m four months out from shoot­ing, what do I need to do? How much do I need to do? How much do I need to play? How many hours a day? What kind of prac­tise do I need to do?’ And he sim­ply said: ​‘The best thing you can do between now and Sep­tem­ber is to learn the songs and con­nect to the lyrics and the music as your­self, and then come to see me.’ So I went to stay with him in Nashville, Ten­nessee for five weeks before we start­ed shoot­ing, then we just worked on mod­u­lat­ing the tone and and style of my gui­tar tech­nique. But the leg work was about learn­ing the soul of the songs.

How did you con­nect to the music?

Like any­thing, as an actor, It’s always an active imag­i­na­tion and pas­sion. So you sing, ​‘The silence of a falling star / lights up a pur­ple sky / and as I won­der where you are / I’m so lone­some I could cry.’ You just have too put your­self in the space of what it feels like to say that. And I think there’s no one on this earth that has nev­er felt it.

In many ways, your per­for­mance as Hank was quite restrained.

How do you mean? I just want to qual­i­fy it. Because I feel that there were moments of extremity.

You didn’t over­do it. He was such an extreme char­ac­ter that it could’ve eas­i­ly become hyperbolic.

In shoot­ing it, I felt like there was extrem­i­ty there, and he vac­il­lat­ed between charm and gen­eros­i­ty. He was tor­ment­ed and mourn­ful, struck by self­ish­ness and grief. And he had a hot tem­per. He was wild and tru­ant and uncon­trol­lable and unpre­dictable. But the thing I had to do was com­mit to his truth. Which was very com­plex in a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent ways. I had to com­mit to the truth of his incred­i­ble charis­ma, but also his pri­vate vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and his pain. There is all this pain that he didn’t even know about, this back prob­lem that was undi­ag­nosed for years and years. That gave him grief.

This was a pain he was born with.

He was born with it. He was out hunt­ing and he fell and hurt his back. He had it exam­ined and the doc­tor told him he had spina bifi­da for his whole life. And he went, ​“well…I know” and it was one of those things that no one had ever cared about because he had such a tough life, a tough upbring­ing. But from the biogra­phies that I read, it’s almost as if that was part of what impelled him to become a musi­cian. He wasn’t strong enough to get draft­ed into the mil­i­tary, he wasn’t strong enough to work on the farm. But he had this gui­tar and he knew how to play it. That was this one thing that he latched on to.

Had you ever played the gui­tar before?

Only for myself. Just doo­dling around, play­ing bits of Bob Dylan. I feel like what he did was coun­try, blues and folk and I took that from my time with Rod­ney, who is an incred­i­ble man. And such an admir­er of Hank. I remem­ber my dis­cov­ery of Bob Dylan, who I didn’t real­ly get till I was about 21 and I sud­den­ly just under­stood it and became obsessed with him for about two years. You can lis­ten to Dylan talk about Hank – he is the lead­ing light, an inspi­ra­tion for him as a songwriter.

One of the sequences in the film sees Hank dis­cov­er­ing that his wife, Audrey, is preg­nant, but they don’t actu­al­ly say any­thing to one another.

We were try­ing to con­vey the exhaus­tion of being on the road. Hank would go away for three weeks to pro­mote a record and he’d be play­ing a gig in Louisville and then they would have a drink and then they would get in the car and dri­ve to Knoxville and do a show at six in the morn­ing, so when he got off the road he was just wiped out. I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I actu­al­ly con­vinc­ing­ly did that thing of por­tray­ing a man who is try­ing to lis­ten but all he wants to do is go to sleep. I think we also want­ed to show that these peo­ple were just people.