Amidst the summer\u2019s plethora of advertisements aimed at the moronic,\u00a0desperate\u00a0and gullible, an especially crass one stands out. Ralph Lauren\u00a0have\u00a0decided, for reasons best known to themselves, that their well-heeled and preppy customers need the unholy duo of the actor Tom Hiddleston and a computer-generated \u2018Polo Bear\u2019 to advertise their product.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Over a series of embarrassing-looking commercials, poorly scripted and indifferently filmed, Hiddleston has to spout dialogue along the lines of\u00a0\u2018Strawberries and cream are one of life\u2019s great lessons in simplicity\u2019,\u00a0watched by a huge, mute ursine, who is as close to\u00a0a more sinister-looking version of\u00a0Paddington as he might be without Michael Bond\u2019s estate being paid a royalty.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
I am not entirely sure as to which bright spark came up with the idea that what the Ralph Lauren brand really needed was the combination of Hiddleston and a bear, but now we have it, and social media has duly been flooded with videos of the Old Etonian and Cambridge-educated actor manfully attempting to give his bathetic utterances some kind of nuance and interest. It would have been a hard task for Laurence Olivier (who, lest we forget, was reduced to flogging Polaroid cameras towards the end of his life) to pull off, but Hiddleston, for all his undoubted charm and rabid fandom, is no Olivier, and so the\u00a0odd-couple dynamic of him and a grizzly is devoid of anything apart from a certain strange curiosity.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The questions that I asked after watching the advertisements were firstly\u00a0\u2018Why?\u2019,\u00a0then\u00a0\u2018How?\u2019\u00a0and lastly, but not least,\u00a0\u2018Does Tom Hiddleston need the money that badly?\u2019\u00a0Olivier did, but that was because his health was suffering and after many years of acclaimed but hardly lucrative stage work, he wished to provide financially for his family. But a glance at Hiddleston\u2019s recent career suggests that he is an actor who should hardly be prostituting himself in this manner. He recently starred in an acclaimed\u00a0Much Ado About Nothing\u00a0opposite Hayley Atwell; reprised his bottom-baring\u00a0role in\u00a0The Night Manager\u2019s second series (where, once again, he was acted off the screen by his fellow OE Hugh Laurie);\u00a0plays in Soccer Aid; and raises two children with his wife Zawe Ashton.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
It might be the latter that has led to this unseemly wish for moolah. It\u00a0is unlikely that the junior\u00a0Hiddlestons\u00a0will be going to the local comprehensive any time soon, and school fees are rising at\u00a0a precipitous rate thanks to the current government. But there are ways of taking on well-paid, artistically unfulfilling work and not looking as if one has sold one\u2019s soul to do so, and, unfortunately, Hiddleston has been dogged for most of his career by the shadow of Loki, the Marvel anti-hero who he has played\u00a0repeatedly\u00a0in a variety of films and television series.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
It seems strange to remember that when Hiddleston first appeared as Loki in the Kenneth Branagh-directed\u00a0Thor (2011),\u00a0he was a little-known British character actor who was\u00a0probably best\u00a0known for appearing alongside Wallander in the television series\u00a0Wallander.\u00a0The part gave him an international fanbase of millions,\u00a0presumably a\u00a0vast\u00a0amount of money in the bank and household name recognition. Yet it also stymied what looked at one point as if it\u00a0was\u00a0going to be an exciting career as a great classical actor. Branagh made no bones about serving as a mentor to Hiddleston, with the two appearing alongside each other in a 2008 staging of\u00a0Ivanov,\u00a0and there seemed the potential for the younger actor to have a similar career trajectory to the veteran thespian, combining one-for-them paycheque roles with genuinely interesting and forward-looking performances.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0It seems a lifetime ago that he was a brawny, brainy Coriolanus at the Donmar Warehouse in 2013<\/p>\n
This has, unfortunately, not\u00a0come to pass. Hiddleston hasn\u2019t given a great screen performance since 2015, when he was well cast as the lead in Ben Wheatley\u2019s adaptation of J.G. Ballard\u2019s dystopian novel\u00a0High-Rise,\u00a0and while he won acclaim for his appearances in the theatre in\u00a0Betrayal\u00a0and\u00a0Much Ado,\u00a0it seems a lifetime ago that he was a brawny, brainy Coriolanus at the Donmar Warehouse in 2013. It was then that I knew that he had the potential to achieve greatness if he wanted to, but unfortunately the demands of the Marvel roles got in the way, and so he has become a rather disappointing figure, churning out variations on the same schtick\u00a0again. And when he does try and break the mould \u2013 as in the flop Stephen King adaptation\u00a0The Life of Chuck\u00a0\u2013 the results are usually\u00a0unsuccessful.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
I would dearly love Hiddleston \u2013 a man who is, by all accounts, one of the genuinely nicest and warmest people in the industry \u2013 to be given, or to look for, the kind of roles and opportunities that an actor of his considerable talent deserves. Otherwise, he will be stuck in this talent-munching morass for the rest of his career, and that would be, in its own small way, a tragic waste of one of Britain\u2019s most talented thespians. If that does happen, that it\u00a0literally would\u00a0be a case of exit, pursued by a bear.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amidst the summer\u2019s plethora of advertisements aimed at the moronic,\u00a0desperate\u00a0and gullible, an especially crass one stands out. Ralph…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":527566,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-527565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/527566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}