{"id":817356,"date":"2026-07-21T23:20:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T23:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/817356\/"},"modified":"2026-07-21T23:20:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T23:20:09","slug":"let-tom-hiddleston-be-your-guide-to-pompeiis-final-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/817356\/","title":{"rendered":"Let Tom Hiddleston be your guide to Pompeii’s final day"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it spewed molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum<\/a>, killing thousands of people. It\u2019s one of the most famous natural disasters in human history, so naturally there have been countless documentaries about Pompeii (and at least one popular song<\/a>). But only one features actor Tom Hiddleston<\/a> taking on the role of a \u201ctime detective\u201d to bring the people of Pompeii to vivid life. That would be National Geographic\u2019s new three-part docuseries, Pompeii: Out of Time.<\/p>\n

The Marvel connection made Out of Time happen. Executive producer Kevin Wright was also a producer on the Disney+ series Loki, which included a scene where Hiddleston\u2019s Loki travels through time to visit Pompeii. Hiddleston also studied classics at Cambridge University and had visited the Pompeii archaeological site as a teenager, which the Marvel star attributes to indirectly influencing his career path into acting.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is just a passion to the way Tom tells stories that\u2019s infectious,\u201d Wright told Ars. \u201cWe knew that if we could capture that and put it into [the series], it might interest people who wouldn\u2019t normally want to watch a documentary about Pompeii. \u201c<\/p>\n

The docuseries combines the usual historical and scientific facts with Hiddleston\u2019s personal journey of discovery. He homes in on three people in particular and follows them over the city\u2019s final 24 hours to discover whether or not they survived: a teenage boy, a local businesswoman, and a Praetorian guard. Stilted re-enactments are replaced with scripted dramatic scenes and high production values to make it all feel more cinematic. It\u2019s an unusual approach, if only because we\u2019re so conditioned to what a documentary \u201cshould\u201d be. But the blended approach makes for a powerful experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe felt we could use the imagination to make a more human story. This isn\u2019t just ancient history; these were real people, and their lives were not dramatically different than ours even though they lived 2,000 years ago,\u201d said Wright. \u201cOne of the most freeing moments was when we came to this idea of \u2018historia,\u2019 the merging of imagination and historical fact, and that \u2018storytelling\u2019 and \u2018history\u2019 in Latin are the same word. It was Hiddleston who put us onto that. When we went to our historians, our experts, with that word, we were met with nothing but enthusiasm. There seems to be a real movement in archaeology of, \u2018This is how you have to approach it now.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it spewed molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the cities…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":817357,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75],"class_list":["post-817356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=817356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/817356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/817357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=817356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=817356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=817356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}