By: Izumi Hasegawa June 13, 2025
We discovered that Tom Hiddleston is an incredible dancer through his new movie, The Life of Chuck. We asked him about his dance training and his thoughts on Stephen King’s story.
By the way, in the film, there are ads everywhere saying “Thank you, Chuck, 39 years.” In Japanese, the numbers 3 and 9 can be read as “san” and “kyuu,” which sound like “thank you.” Do you think it’s just a coincidence that King used the number 39?
Q: What percentage of those days were spent dancing?
TH: I think about 85. Or Maybe 87. I’m no math guy. I’m just the dancing guy. But yes, I actually my filming days amounted to five, I think. It was Monday to Friday. And it was the first week of principal photography. So, we started out on the dance floor on a Monday morning. Or maybe you started with Taylor. Setting up the drums, yeah. So, it was, for both of us, it was the first thing we did. And Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I had burned holes in my shoes and out on the asphalt in Alabama. And then on the Friday, we did all the scenes where Chuck is with his wife Ginny and his son and, you know, in bed near the end. So, it was an extraordinary compressed week. A life compressed, if you like. But we were careful in the run up. We knew what we were doing, or at least we thought we did in terms of preparing for the dance.
Q: How much are you trying to be conscious of that idea to a small degree in how it informs your performance?
TH: Well, I think what was crystallized for me when I read the script for the first time was that feeling that we all share, or it’s a knowledge none of us have. Which is none of us know what the last day of our lives will be. None of us know the last date. None of us know how it’s gonna end. And we all live, each of us every day in that uncertainty. And we do the best we can with the life we have. And that awareness, I think, is something that comes in and out of focus in our lives. That actually this is not a dress rehearsal. What’s the Voltaire quote? We all have two lives, the second begins when you realize you only have one. And you don’t know when that life is gonna run out. And I don’t know that Chuck knows that it’s going to end at the moment of putting his briefcase down and moving his hips to the beat of the drums. But I knew on Chuck’s behalf. And what Mike’s (Mike Flanagan, director and writer) screenplay and what Stephen King’s story describe so beautifully is the magic of those small moments in our lives which will become the brightest stars in our memories in the last hours of our lives. And so there was this, I had this awareness of the preciousness and the fragility of living, but also the magic and the majesty of connection in the every day. And so, I’m just getting to dance that out, I suppose, as Chuck. And it’s so beautifully described in the story, that this is, this moment on the sidewalk on a Thursday afternoon is maybe a moment of an expression of the most intense freedom of his entire life. He’s completely free. He’s completely in the present moment. He’s completely alive. And in six months’ time, his life will be over.
Q: And that’s that main theme of fully embracing every day of your life, and that dance sequence really seems to drive that point home. And I guess it’s something that you reacted to, and I hope, I guess you would hope audience members would react to as well.
TH: Yeah. And I think the thing that I was so moved by, to Mike’s point, is we contain multitudes. It’s true of all of us. None of us are one thing. None of us are the job that we do or the role that we play in our family or in our social circle. We all have, inside the soul of every human being, is an internal world of infinite connections, memories, experiences, and possibilities. And we should never submit to the reduction that we’re just one thing. Our lives are magic. Yes, our lives are full of struggle and suffering and grief and pain and loss, that’s true as well. But they’re also magic. And there’s so much joy there. And that’s the bit I found moving is that Charles Krantz, to the external world, he seems to be the gray man in the gray suit. Mr. Businessman, walking to the business conference with his business briefcase. He’s never gonna stop and listen to the music. But actually, inside the soul of this, you know, accountant who loves his job and loves his wife and loves his son, is this dancer. And that might be true of anyone you know or anyone you see on the street, is inside that human being is greater breadth and depth and range than we could possibly imagine.
Q: That seems to be something that King is really driving at. There is a theme that King is writing about how technology is keeping us from human connection. Did you feel you had to preserve it in your adaptation?
TH: Oh, certainly. I think the thing in the story that hit me when I first read it, when he goes into the details of what it means that the Internet is gone, that that connection is gone, it is impossible for me to imagine a world without the Internet. I grew up in a world without the Internet. It’s very strange to me. The other thing that struck me, though, is Charles Krantz is dying of a brain tumor. And so the disruption of connection, the disruption of the Internet took on a whole other meaning for me. And, you know, of course, so a huge percentage of our Internet is used for porn, which I think is, hey, go humans, look at us. I think one of the things that struck me, though, aside from the joke of it and where I think Stephen was kind of pointing is that that’s just another area of Chuck’s life and existence that blinks out early. ou know, I didn’t read it as like, oh yeah, porn is gone. I read it as Chuck is dying in this bed, that part of his life, you know, that is connected to sexuality is gone, which happens to all of us at a certain point. And it was just one of the many facets of him to disappear. So, you know, I think Stephen hits on something incredible about we now live in the most interconnected existence, you know, human beings have ever known. How we’ve used that connectivity, you know, can be a bit disappointing. And the loss of that connectivity is something that’s so hard to imagine. But we are dismantling and losing this incredible Internet, this incredible connectivity, this connected world that we’ve built with each other. We all lose it at the end.
Q: What would you do in your own life if it really was the end of everything?
TH: I think Stephen is raising a really interesting question about the quality of our connections as they stand. And as things start to break down, you know, as traffic grinds to a halt, as the Internet goes down, as the phone lines go down, as you start seeing images of whole land masses sliding into the sea, the immediacy of, to Marty’s (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) point, I don’t need this. I have two legs. I’m gonna walk over there, and we’re gonna have a real conversation. And maybe Stephen is asking questions like, perhaps we don’t do that enough. That we have the resources we need, but we lean on our technologies, which are simulating real connection, but they’re not actually the substance of human connection.
The Life of Chuck is playing in theaters.
