Whenever a celeb makes a sudden move from one romance to another, the first question is a natural: what does she see in him? If the star is Taylor Swift and her new guy is Tom Hiddleston, the buzz threatens to reach deafening levels.
Twitter reacted almost as fast as Swift’s shift from music producer Calvin Harris to The Man Who Would Be the New James Bond. Recall that the newly single 26-year-old singer sat next to English actor Hiddleston at the Met Gala dinner at the beginning of May. She persuaded him to dance with her, and the rest, as they say, is very recent history.
Swift and Harris parted company a month later amid assurances from all sides that no third parties were responsible.
Two weeks later Swift and Hiddleston were photographed in a sweet stroll and a kiss reported on June 15 and seen round the social media world. The setting was the appropriately romantic if rocky beach near Swift’s Watch Hill, Rhode Island home. The image ignited Twitter fans into a frenzy of showing off that they do, too, know who Hiddleston is.
“Damn can’t wait for the exclusive Taylor Swift track that’s gonna play over the credits of Thor: Ragnarok,” read one tweet. “Taylor Swift is the sixth infinity stone,” said another. These are ultimate inside-baseball references to Hiddleston’s role as Loki in the Marvel movies starting in 2011 with Thor and most recently in 2013’s Thor: The Dark World.
A wider audience may be tuning in to his appearance in the current AMC miniseries of John le Carre’s spy novel, The Night Manager. The AMC project and shots of Hiddleston in his shorts produced the hashtag #Hiddlesbum and the actor’s reference to that part of his anatomy as his “English countryside.”
But, seriously, the 35-year-old has a very respectable and lengthy list of acting credits in addition to his beguiling charm and cuteness. He’s a classically trained graduate of The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He’s done Shakespeare. His portrayal of country music legend and Mt. Olive, Alabama native Hank Williams is dead-on in I Saw the Light, and that’s got to be a stretch for a guy born in Westminster and raised in Wimbledon and later the Cotswolds.
He can sing. He graciously submitted to Stephen Colbert’s strong arming on The Late Show and joined in a duet.
There’s more, and hats off to Popsugar for assembling some fun and adorable facts you need to know about Hiddleston. Check it out. You’ll join Taylor and the rest of us in a sustained swoon. Are you listening, James Bond casting directors?
