In 2024, “Loki” star Tom Hiddleston reunited with the film’s executive producer Kevin R. Wright to create a documentary that wasn’t about a salacious murder, a cult or Hiddleston’s acting career. Instead, the duo set out to make a doc about Pompeii and the attempts of three real Romans to survive the ancient city’s final hours after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79.
The result is “Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston,” a three-part Nat Geo docuseries that blends “Loki”-inspired time travel with scripted drama and interviews between Hiddleston – the “Time Detective” – and archaeologists, historians, geologists, and disaster experts. Hiddleston examines long-held assumptions about the disaster and pours over ancient records and artifacts that bring to life the humanity and resilience of Pompeii’s inhabitants.
It’s an ambitious, entertaining hybrid show with the potential to pull off the impossible by attracting a wider audience including younger viewers.
“We certainly feel like we’ve unlocked an exciting format,” Wright told Variety. “We partially felt free to mash forms together because of how people consume media now anyway. You’re on your phone and scroll from clips from movies and shows, to a news story, to your friend’s travel photography and vacation videos. Our brains are kind of used to jumping around, for better or worse. And so we didn’t think it would be a shock to the system for us to interweave our story in a similar manner.”
