Emmys 2016: Tom Hiddleston talks The Night Manager role

While Tom Hiddleston is known by most as Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the actor earned his first Emmy nomination for The Night Manager, a project that drew him in for unexpected reasons.

“Interestingly enough, the most well-known things I’ve done have been actually at the extremes of my range, and I don’t look like myself, to be honest. I look like somebody else,” he told EW. “And as [Jonathan] Pine, I look like me, in a way. So that’s new. Strangely for an actor, that felt new.”

Hiddleston embraced the Gothic era in 2015’s Crimson Peak and he plays a tracker in 2017’s Kong: Skull Island, but the AMC miniseries envisioned him as an MI6 field agent tasked with bringing down an arms dealer, played by Hugh Laurie.

As the actor explained, he was drawn to “the tension in [Pine] between his exterior and interior. Someone who’s dutiful and diplomatic and elegant, but is sort of chaotic and turbulent on the inside.” He later added how moved he was by the character’s “moral courage.”

“The Edmund Burke quotation: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,'” Hiddleston said. “And Pine is a good man who does something, and I found that very moving.”

Check out Hiddleston in the full video above.