British actor Tom Hiddleston has played the title role in Coriolanus onstage, Loki in Marvel’s massively profitable Avengers franchise, and the night manager in the new prestige-y miniseries The Night Manager. He is rumored to be on the shortlist to play James Bond. The 35-year-old British actor is versatile, and he’s on his way to becoming a household name.* But the role he is probably best known for is a less glamorous one: dancing monkey.
Hiddleston likes to dance, and he is very good at it. So good, in fact, that after he demonstrated these skills during one memorable appearance at a Korean promotional event in 2013—when he knocked over a chair capering to the crowd’s adoring screams—he has been repeatedly commanded to dance over and over again in public and been tossed pellets of praise upon performing as directed. The actor has done something called “snake hips” on top of a bed for MTV and then Gangnam-Styled for good measure. He has pranced with an all-female pop group for SNL Korea. The man has been montaged and GIF’d to within an inch of his life, and various YouTube videos of his impromptu performance in Korea have been viewed more than 4 million times. When he kicked his heels up on the glittering set of the British talk show Chatty Man, the host bowed down in worship:
Hiddleston’s predicament—if you can really call it that—is in some ways a uniquely modern phenomenon. The guy does a little footwork during a photo shoot for an obscure British magazine, and the footage ends up spliced into dozens of fan-produced montages online.
Hiddleston’s fans do not require lengthy, committed dance sequences to satiate them. When he did a suave version of the robot with Taylor Swift at the Met Gala last month, a series of dark, blurry Snapchats and Instagram posts instantly went viral:
A week later he spun around an after-party at the TV British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards with similar results. He shimmied for a split second in the January trailer for the thriller High-Rise, and Entertainment Weekly crowed that he was “dancing and dangerous.”
By now, Hiddleston has been asked about dancing so often in interviews that there is enough material to compile into listicles like “12 Tom Hiddleston Quotes About Dancing That Will Inspire You to Move.” When an entertainment reporter asked Chris Hemsworth to play a word-association game about his Avengers costars, his immediate response to Hiddleston’s name was “dancing.”
As word has spread of his skills, the media has accordingly demanded that he turn on the charm on command. And so the entertainment industrial complex has ended up producing moments like this one, in which Hiddleston is egged into a half-hearted dance-off with actor Zachary Levi on the Thor 2 red carpet:
This man won a Laurence Olivier Award for his role in Cymbeline on the London stage. But success means doing a pained jig for photographers as Maria Menounos shrieks “This is an Extra exclusive!” in the background.
Hiddleston is far from the first male star to be forced to hoof it on repeat. First there was (and is) Channing Tatum, of course, who’d actually worked as a stripper and got his big break as an actor in the dance romance Step Up, some half a decade before he cemented his legacy with Magic Mike. Paul Rudd, at this point, has two-stepped his way across too many talk show stages to count. All of these guys can really dance, but it’s not just that. They are equal parts coordinated and goofy, sexy and silly. They exude a happy-go-lucky gameness. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly,” you might tell them, but they would coax you out onto the dance floor anyway, and make you laugh while doing it. Their moves are more mesmerizing than a thousand canned red carpet quips. And the media, sensing an opportunity, has readily capitalized, especially in the wake of Tatum’s meteoric, pelvic-thrusting rise. It’s hard to blame them, but it does make for a pretty desperate spectacle: the reporters straining to wring some ratings magic from a Hiddleston hip swivel; the male celebrities blessed with rhythm and sex appeal doomed to shimmy on the publicity hamster wheel for all eternity. Painful as it is to imagine, it may finally be time to set the dancing monkeys free.
*Correction, June 1, 2016: This article originally misstated actor Tom Hiddleston’s age. He is 35, not 32.
