TOM HIDDLESTON WAS finishing up the first season of Loki when he got the call: would you like to play a vicar? “They sent me the six episode scripts, and a letter from [director] Clio Barnard,” Hiddleston recalls. “I was just immediately engaged by it.” The scripts he read were an adaptation of The Essex Serpent, a bestselling 2016 gothic mystery novel by Sarah Perry, set largely on the rural coastlines of Essex during the late Victorian era. Hiddleston, at the time, was engaged in a battle for the multiverse with a variant of his character that took the form of an alligator. The future job promised quite a different experience.
“New experiences are always full of curiosity and interest to me,” he says. Part of that difference was the character he was playing. Loki is complex, to put it generously, with occasional genocidal tendencies; his character in The Essex Serpent, Reverend Will Ransome, is fundamentally decent, a family man who cares for his flock, and worries about the effect that rumours of a mythical sea creature are having on his parish. “He has very different foundations in his character,” Hiddleston says. “Will is a much more solid and much more responsible person than Loki. I wouldn’t put Loki in charge of managing the anxiety of his parishioners.”