Tom Hiddleston Talks Nude Scene in 'High-Rise' Commentary Clip
Tom Hiddleston is currently making news thanks to his budding relationship with pop star Taylor Swift, but he’s also been turning heads with his performances on TV in The Night Manager, and on the big screen — most recently as an increasingly unstable doctor in director Ben Wheatley’s scathing sci-fi social satire High-Rise, based on a J.G. Ballard novel. That button-pushing saga concerns a residential ’70s English skyscraper that slowly devolves into an anarchic class-warfare battleground, although before a descent into carnage, madness, and dog-eating depravity takes place, the film finds a moment to show off its star sunbathing naked (well, he does have some strategically placed reading material and a towel). Now, you can hear him and Wheatley discuss that exposed moment in a new online clip debuted at Collider (watch it above).
Tom Hiddleston gets some sun in ‘High-Rise’
The 4-minute clip – an excerpt from the commentary track on High-Rise’s home video release — finds Hiddleston and Wheatley chatting about the origins of the project as a spec script (i.e., one that’s written without a firm production deal already in place), as well as Hiddleston’s attraction to the project, which is based on Ballard’s 1975 novel of the same name. While the two don’t do much more than share a quick laugh about Hiddleston’s brief on-screen nudity — with the filmmaker joking that he wanted to base the entire publicity campaign around his lead in the buff (“This is it, this is my whole plan, to hang all of the marketing on Tom Hiddleston being naked. And it’s worked a treat!”) — the snippet of their feature-length conversation reveals not only their good-humored personalities, but also how a film like this is developed, from idea to adaptation to filming to screen.
Tom Hiddleston in ‘High-Rise’
When it debuted at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, Yahoo Movies’ Brian Raftery wrote that “What ultimately holds High-Rise together — especially during its chaotic, and occasionally lurching, final half-hour — is Hiddleston himself. He could easily have played Lang’s decline with cartoonish camp, but instead, he remains even-keeled and almost downright serene.” You can experience the off-the-wall film (and its occasionally naked star) on VOD and digital platforms now; it premieres on Blu-ray and DVD on Aug. 2.
‘High-Rise’: Watch the trailer:
