Tom Hiddleston calls 'Pompeii: Out of Time' an 'extraordinary confluence of my passions'

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Set us as preferred Thirty years ago a teenage boy, traveling abroad and without parents for the first time, came upon a scene of staggering destruction.At Pompeii, when Tom Hiddleston saw the casts of the bodies killed by the explosion of Mt.Vesuvius in AD 79, he wasn’t just horrified, he was mesmerized, even excited; amid all that death it felt like the past was alive.“Until that point, it had existed in books in the classroom, but I felt like was going back in time, walking into the past,” he said in a recent video interview about “Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston,” his new series that’s a hybrid of travelogue, documentary and extensive dramatic reenactments (with a meta touch).“I was knocked sideways by the quality of the preservation,” he recalled of that teenage visit.

“You can hear that these buildings carry the echoes of the lives they contained because of the frescoes, the mosaics, the furniture.You feel 2,000 years compress and collapse.

It’s like magic.”Hiddleston knows something about magic and time travel.After studying classics at Cambridge, his acting career led to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the role of Loki, the god of mischief and “the boundary crosser.” Loki’s movie misdeeds get him “removed from the timeline of history,” and in the “Loki” spinoff TV show, he faces his past while bouncing through time.One place Loki lands is Pompeii.

Hiddleston was actually on a set in Atlanta, but there he was speaking Latin and revisiting his own past.“I felt this extraordinary confluence of my passions.”Hiddleston had been talking with producer Kevin R.

Wright about his fascination with the ancient world, and after seeing Hiddleston in fictional Pompeii, Wright got the ball rolling on “Out of Time,” co-writing and helping to produce the series, which debuts Wedn...