In 2024, Loki star Tom Hiddleston reunited with series executive producer Kevin R. Wright to create a documentary that wasn’t about a dastardly murder, a religious cult, or Hiddleston’s acting career. Instead, the pair set out to make a documentary about Pompeii and the attempts of three real Romans to survive the ancient city’s final hours after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
The result is “Pompeii: Time of Time with Tom Hiddleston”. The documentary is a three-part National Geographic documentary series that blends Loki-inspired time travel, scripted drama, and interviews with “time detective” Hiddleston and archaeologists, historians, geologists, and disaster experts. Hiddleston examines long-held theories about this disaster and infuses it with ancient records and artifacts that bring to life the humanity and resilience of Pompeii’s residents.
This is an ambitious and entertaining hybrid show that has the potential to do the impossible by attracting a wider audience, including younger viewers.
“We certainly feel like we’ve unlocked an exciting format,” Wright told Variety. “We felt free to mash up the forms in part because of how people consume media now anyway. When you’re on your phone, you can scroll through clips from movies and shows, to news articles, to friends’ travel photos and vacation videos. Our brains are used to jumping around, for better or for worse, so we didn’t think weaving our stories together in a similar way would be a shock to the system.”
Series showrunner and director Tom Barber-Might said one of the reasons the drama, characters and time travel were incorporated into the docuseries was to appeal to a wide audience.
“I’m always interested in using dramatic techniques in fact-based stories and vice versa, breaking down distinctions between genres,” Barber-Might said. “I think part of the secret sauce of Pompeii: Out of Time is that it uses two forms of filmmaking – documentary and drama – to tell a single story. We hope that this hybrid approach will attract audiences who might not normally watch traditional historical documentaries, including young film literates.”
In each episode of Pompeii: Out of Time, Hiddleston travels through time between the ruins of present-day Pompeii and a recreation of Pompeii in August 79 AD, set in Malta. With a twist of his hand, Hiddleston transports the audience back in time, where he meets teenage apprentice bronzesmith Avianius, bathhouse owner Julia Felix, and an unnamed SS guard. With the help of experts, he puts together how each coped with the volcanic eruption.
“Telling a story is the way I’ve always learned,” said Hiddleston, who studied classics at Cambridge University. “When I was studying history and literature, I couldn’t help but have an overactive imagination. So when I read ‘The Odyssey’ in Greek, I pictured it in my head. I watched it like a movie.”
Hiddleston first visited the ruins of Pompeii without adult supervision in 1998 as a 17-year-old student.
“Until that trip, the study of the ancient world was done in books,” he said. “It was a classroom. It was homework. So, for the first time on that trip, I understood that the past is a place you can visit.”
Hiddleston returned to Pompeii via green screen in the second episode of season 1 of Loki in 2021. In this episode, Loki and Mobius (Owen Wilson) time travel to Pompeii just before the disaster begins. 2 years later. Plimsoll producer Alan Ayers approached the star about making a documentary about the ancient city for Nat Geo and Disney+.
Hiddleston signed on partly because of his fascination with Pompeii, and partly because he was inspired by his Thor co-star Chris Hemsworth’s two Nat Geo series: A Road Trip to Remember, which depicts Hemsworth’s father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and Limitless, which follows Hemsworth as he attempts to discover and demonstrate the secret to living a longer, healthier life.
Barber Might directed “Road Trip” and the first season finale of “Limitless,” “Acceptance.”
“When[Tom and I]first met, we hadn’t even gotten the green light yet. When we were still developing and packaging the show, we talked a lot about ‘Road Trip’ and ‘Limitless.’ With both ‘Acceptance’ and ‘Road Trip,’ I started with a playful and comedic tone to draw you in, before the stories slowly became very emotional,” Barber-Might said. I think this approach reassured Tom that he could not only tell the story of a documentary, but also access the same emotional depth and empathy for the characters that is often found in drama. ”
Hiddleston, Barber-Might and Wright discussed various films that had done interesting things with the format, but Wright said they were primarily inspired by a fear of “getting it wrong and making a bad version of the show.”
“The word docudrama is almost a dirty word because it conjures up images of dramas with wooden costumes, bad togas, and unemotional scenes played on cheap pan flutes,” Wright said. “So every step of the way, we were actively thinking about how we could make this movie more engaging, experiential, emotional, and heartfelt. How do we reinvent a genre that’s been largely stagnant? You’re free to be guided by your desires. Is this what you want these movies and shows to be? Well, let’s do it!”
“Pompeii: Out of Time” will premiere on Nat Geo on July 22nd and will be released streaming on Disney+/Hulu on July 23rd.
