How Loki Inspired Tom Hiddleston’s Ambitious New Pompeii Docuseries
National Geographic’s Pompeii: Out of Time has been over 5 years in the making.
It all began with an odd moment on the set of Loki Season 1. Kevin Wright, the executive producer of Loki who had shepherded the show alongside head writer Michael Waldron and director Kate Herron, was preparing an episode that would bring Loki to Pompeii right before the explosion of Mount Vesuvius. The scene involved Loki bursting into a loud rant in Latin about the oncoming cataclysm, before a crowd of frightened onlookers. But little did Wright know that Hiddleston had been preparing for this moment almost his entire life.
“We had translations of what the Latin was going to be. Tom corrected us on it,” Wright recalls to Inverse. “And then so that made me go, huh.”
It was there that Hiddleston revealed that not only was the subject of Pompeii “a great personal passion of mine,” he had the knowledge to back it up: Hiddleston had studied classics at university. Specifically, he had a bachelor’s degree from Cambridge on the ancient world. “I was in the library writing essays every week about the Roman world, ancient Greece, fifth century Athens, the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire philosophy, the whole thing. That was literally my honors degree,” Hiddleston tells Inverse.
Loki visits Pompeii in that fateful scene in Loki Season 1.
So when they shot the Pompeii scene, thinking that it was simply a “fun place for Loki and Mobius [Owen Wilson] to go back to” in their search for the rogue Loki variant, Hiddleston was living a lifelong dream. “I did love that scene because it was like stepping into a recreation of my own personal passion,” Hiddleston says.
Just a few years later, Hiddleston would be recreating that personal passion on an even grander scale. He was approached by Plimsoll producer Alan Eyres in the summer of 2023 with an idea of making a documentary about Pompeii. “I said, ‘Funny you ask,’” Hiddleston recalls. “Because I'd been there before twice, once as Loki, which he was aware of and he had enjoyed. And once when I was 17 on a trip with two friends in the show, we included it in the story of the show.”
That’s how he and Wright ended up reuniting to make Pompeii: Out of Time, a three-part docuseries for National Geographic that charts the final hours of Pompeii after the destruction of Mount Vesuvius, through the stories of a teenage apprentice, a powerful businesswoman, and a mysterious Praetorian Guard, who were all present on that fateful day. Hiddleston and Wright wanted Out of Time to be more than just your average docuseries that toggled between a dry host and corny dramatic recreations. So they used what they learned on Loki to turn Out of Time into something wholly unique: part true-crime investigation, part educational deep dive, and part time-travel show. And at the center of it all is Hiddleston, as a “Time Detective” putting all the pieces together.
“We're really proud of Loki,” adds Hiddleston. “As one of the great defining projects of my whole career, truly it felt like a perfect catharsis for everything I had been interested in about the character from the beginning, but in a way we didn't realize it was like a new skillset we were learning about storytelling.”
That new skillset was the use of time itself as “as a grammar or an engine for storytelling,” Hiddleston says. The show presents Hiddleston’s Time Detective investigating whether Pompeii was a castastrophe that took every single life in the city, or whether there could have been any survivors. Hiddleston travels across the world to speak to experts on the subject, and slowly they pull out three stories: Avianius, a teenage blacksmith’s apprentice; Julia Felix, a wealthy bathhouse owner; and an unnamed Praetorian guard. The series, like many a documentary, dutifully recreates their stories and builds to the dramatic eruption, but then it does something interesting: it cuts to Hiddleston frantically looking for more information, or it suddenly stops and freezes time itself. “You can't not acknowledge what [Loki] was and what we did in it, but we can do the stopping time. We could rewind,” Wright says.
One of the dramatic recreations of the final hours of Pompeii.
“We were learning a new grammar about how to explore the idea of time, which is something which is incredibly universal to us all,” Hiddleston says.
Adds Wright, “And we learned that then researchers and historians approach time and storytelling in a similar way now too, which was hugely freeing for us, which was history is still being written.”
That’s why Hiddleston’s host is a self-proclaimed Time Detective. “I think if you ask any historian, that's how they feel is that the business of writing or studying history is in fact like being a detective at the scene of a crime or any kind of detective,” Hiddleston says. “But I like to think it makes the telling of the story incredibly playful and dynamic and it feels like a new way of telling documentary stories that actually it's not just me in front of a camera explaining stuff I already know.”
Hiddleston and Wright filming Pompeii: Out of Time.
So, could you consider Pompeii: Out of Time a sort of thematic — or maybe even canonical — sequel to Loki? Hiddleston, when I pose the idea that his Time Detective could be an offshoot of Loki’s influences within the time tree that encompasses all of the multiverse, was not opposed to the idea.
“Hey, look, it's not beyond the bounds of possibility,” Hiddleston says. “I love that idea. I mean, Loki's in the time tree saying, ‘Tom, I want you to go back to Pompeii and tell the story of Pompeii.’”
On the fate of Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe proper, however, Hiddleston is more tight-lipped: “Well, if I told you that, I don't know whether something would happen to me,” he says wryly.
