In The Life of Chuck, the new film from Mike Flanagan based on the short story by Stephen King, Tom Hiddleston stars as Charles Krantz, a seemingly ordinary man whose extraordinary inner world is revealed as his life is told in reverse. He’s joined by an all-star cast that includes Mark Hamill, Karen Gillan, and Chiwetel Ejiofor in a story that explores memory, mortality, and the beauty of the everyday.
For Hiddleston, the role felt instantly meaningful. “What was crystallized for me when I read the script for the first time was that feeling that we all share… None of us know what the last day of our lives will be. None of us know the last date. None of us know how it’s going to end,” he said at a recent press conference. “And we all live, each of us, every day in that uncertainty. And we do the best we can with the life we have.”
It was that awareness that guided his performance. “This is not a dress rehearsal,” he said. “What’s the Voltaire quote? We all have two lives. The second begins when you realize you only have one.”
In the film, there’s a moment where he fully surrenders to the present: a spontaneous dance. “He’s completely free. He’s completely in the present moment. He’s completely alive,” Hiddleston said. “And in six months’ time, his life will be over.”
The performance required Hiddleston to channel both the weight of knowing what’s to come and the joy that comes from appreciating what you have while you have it. “I had this awareness of the preciousness and the fragility of living but also the magic and the majesty of connection in the everyday. And so, I’m just getting to dump that out as Chuck.”
That dance, he said, wasn’t just a plot point, it was a culmination of the film’s central idea: “This moment on the sidewalk on a Thursday afternoon is maybe a moment of an expression of the most intense freedom of his entire life.”
But for all its emotional power, The Life of Chuck isn’t just about loss, it’s also about rediscovering the hidden parts of ourselves. “The thing that I was so moved by… is we contain multitudes,” Hiddleston said. “None of us are one thing. None of us is a job that we do or the role that we play in our family or in our social circle. Inside the soul of every human being is an internal world of infinite connections, memories, experiences and possibilities. And we should never submit to the reduction that we’re just one thing. Our lives are magic. Yes, our lives are full of struggle and suffering and grief and pain and loss, that’s true as well, but they’re also magic. And there’s so much joy there.”
That’s what drew him to Charles Krantz, a character who, to the outside world, is just a man in a suit with a briefcase. “To the external world, he seems to be the grey man in the grey suit… but actually inside the soul of this accountant who loves his job and loves his wife and loves his son, is this dancer.”
And that realization, he said, isn’t just true for Chuck, it could be true for anyone. “That might be true of anyone you know or anyone you see on the street… that inside that human being is greater breadth and depth and range than we could possibly imagine.”
