Elizabeth Debicki Felt Like an “Australian Baby” When She Met Tom Hiddleston (2024)

In Reunited, Awards Insider hosts a conversation between two Emmy contenders who have collaborated on a previous project.

Elizabeth Debicki had never made a TV series outside of her native Australia when she was first cast in The Night Manager. She joined a starry ensemble led by Tom Hiddleston, who’d been steadily working onscreen for more than a decade and was just reaching the height of his fame in the aftermath of The Avengers, in which he played primary antagonist Loki.

Eight years later, the two find themselves in a completely different space. The Night Manager, adapted from John le Carré’s novel, starred Hiddleston as a luxury-hotel manager recruited to infiltrate the world of a ruthless arms dealer. He received his first Emmy nomination for the role, and is now back in the conversation for the second season of Loki—15 years after he joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (He’ll also be starring in two more seasons of The Night Manager, which are being developed by the BBC and Amazon.)

Debicki, meanwhile, is primed for her second consecutive nomination for her luminous turn as The Crown’s Princess Diana, a role for which she already won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award earlier this year. It’s another rich, heartbreaking supporting performance from the actor who, for many, broke out as Hiddleston’s duplicitous informant in The Night Manager. As they discuss in their reunion (watch above, or read on below), the series was momentous for both of them.

On The Night Manager

Elizabeth Debicki: We’re old now.

Tom Hiddleston: I certainly am. You’re not. You’re not allowed to say that.

Debicki: Do you remember how old I was when I did The Night Manager? I was 24.

Hiddleston: I didn’t know how to tie my shoes when I was 24.

Debicki: I think it was the most glam job.

Hiddleston: I remember it looked very glamorous and we were in some very glamorous locations, but my memory of it was of having to jump between different identities and different costumes. I remember it being quite sort of stressful, in a good way. It was very fast.

Debicki: It was very fast for you. Yeah. I was in much less of it than you. When you watch a TV show as an actor and you see the lead of the show—how many episodes was Night Manager?

Hiddleston: Six.

Debicki: And you see that actor in almost every shot. As an actor, when I watch that, I think, That must’ve been a hard job for them. And I think that was you.

Hiddleston: But you’ve now done that.

Debicki: Yes, I’ve done it much more. But at the time, on our show, my memory of it is very immediately tinged with golden nostalgia. I was so happy making that show. I couldn’t believe I got the part to begin with. Do you remember when we did rehearsals in Marrakesh, in the hotel conference loungey room, and it was you, Hugh [Laurie], Olivia [Colman], Tom [Hollander], Susanne [Bier], and myself? You were all so incredibly articulate, but you’d had so much more experience.

I just remember sitting there, and I honestly had this thought of, One of these things is not like the other one. It was like, Oh my God, I’m such a pleb. Like an Australian baby.

Hiddleston: No, no. That’s not what happened. That’s not how I remember it at all. I remember you just being effortless. The first time we met, I’ll embarrass you briefly: I remember we were doing a script meeting. It was a room above a conference room in Holborn or something in the rain. And we were talking about the shape of the scripts and threading through all kinds of different things in the update. And at the end of that meeting, it was dark outside. Susanne said, “I found Jed.” And they went, “Oh, great, what’s her name?” And she said, “Elizabeth Debicki.” She took her laptop out and said, “This is her tape.” Suddenly, we were all watching your tape for the first time. I remember it was absolutely astonishing. I’ll never forget that. Hugh and I go, “Wow, that’s Jed.” It was the most brilliant audition.

Debicki: We really were everywhere that the camera showed us to be. And that is so extraordinarily rare, and so helpful, because it just informs everything that your body begins to feel, and then your mind catches up with it.

Hiddleston: Did people stop you in the street?

Debicki: No, they didn’t. When my hair was shorter, people used to. It is one of those things that will pop out if you are sitting next to someone at the theater or you meet someone’s aunt at a barbecue.

Hiddleston: So often people say, “Oh my God, you’re the night manager.”

Debicki: They say that you’re the night manager?

Hiddleston: [Nods] And I go, “My name’s Tom. Hello. Nice to meet you.” But the other day, I was in a food shop and I was at the checkout, and a very sweet lady came up to me and said, “Are you the manager?” And I said, “Actually, I’m Tom.” “But are you the manager? I’m looking for roast chicken.” I thought, Okay, sorry, sorry. No, I’m not that manager. I’m flattered that you think I run this place, but—

Debicki: Did you help her find the chicken?

Hiddleston: I did. Yeah. She had other complaints about the store, which I couldn’t remedy, sadly.

On The Crown and Loki

Hiddleston: I bet people stop you in the street about Diana.

Debicki: Nobody stops me in the street. I find that English people are very keen on personal space. As an Australian, I found this here. So yeah, no, no one’s stopping me on the street.

Hiddleston: Let it be said, first off, you are magnificent in The Crown. You’re absolutely magnificent. I don’t know how you did it, frankly. You’ve taken on a character that exists in the public consciousness in such a luminous, striking, and personal way for every person. I’ve watched you and gone, How is she doing this? Because I know you, and so I’m looking for Elizabeth, but I can’t see it. And yet I see aspects of someone who I knew from a distance as a young person. Obviously, I had no proximal relationship to Diana at all.

Debicki: I thought you meant me.

Hiddleston: I think I know you a little better than I knew her.

Debicki: I thought we were friends. [Laughs]

Hiddleston: Oh yeah, come on. But no, I felt I got to know Diana more intimately through what you were doing, and it was so human, and compassionate, and loving, and detailed. I mean, the detail in your performance is astonishing.

Debicki: It felt like it was the right-sized challenge for what I wanted to try and do as an actor. That’s a retrospective. Beforehand, I felt very, very nervous. I mean very nervous. This was translated into me becoming quite fixated on the technicality of everything in the beginning.

Hiddleston: But that keeps you safe, doesn’t it?

Debicki: It felt like it was keeping me safe until actually it felt like it was sort of a hindrance. I watched a lot. I thought maybe by osmosis I would just absorb, which I think I sort of did once you sit with enough hours. It was a very all-consuming two and a bit years. I feel that I have an encyclopedic knowledge of certain strange things. I also have a vast treasure chest of stories because once you play somebody like that—when I was on the King’s Road, I got out of a cab, and there she was walking into a hat shop or whatever it was. And they’ll say, “It was the 16th of May, it was a Thursday.” It’s burned into people’s memories. I’m very clear about the fact that it was a character that I created, but it was a great gift. It taught me a lot about being a person. I think it opened up my heart a lot.

Hiddleston: What an amazing thing to say.

Debicki: What a gift, yeah. You know, I don’t know a terrible amount about Marvel.

Hiddleston: Apart from having been in one of the films.

Debicki: Yes, I’ve been in two of them. [Laughs] When I was working with you on The Night Manager, how many films had you already done by then where you played Loki? Two?

Hiddleston: Three. I was 33.

Debicki: I sort of didn’t know that it was this massive thing and you were a massive star. That character has been with you for how many years?

Hiddleston: Fifteen years now. I’m now 43, and I was cast when I was 28.

Debicki: What does it feel like to be with someone for that long?

Hiddleston: Definitely there was a moment of, maybe similar to what you were saying about being cast in The Night Manager—a very lengthy audition process. And then Kevin Feige saying, “Actually, we’ve got plans for Loki.” There were plans far above and beyond my expectations. I thought I was just doing it for one film, that Loki would be the antagonist in the first Avengers film because he was the antagonist in the first Avengers comic. And suddenly I was standing in a circle with Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, and Chris Evans, all of us in our vibrant, multicolored outfits. The film came out and it changed all of our lives, I think. It changed my life forever.

I always saw him as a broken soul with a shattered heart. Across the journey, all the way up to the show, I wanted to find a way of redeeming, to sort of find his way back to the light. And to have had the chance to do that across 15 years is really rare because the audience is coming with you too. The audience is invested in who the character is. He’s such a complex character—the mask of the character is full of wit and charm and playfulness, but the mask is hiding all the loneliness and the pain and the loss.

Debicki: There’s a great vulnerability inside of him.

Hiddleston: There’s a presentation of something, and then behind that, on the inside, there’s something much more turbulent, much more broken, much more on fire. And occasionally you get to see these windows where you get to look into these lonely characters.

Debicki: But is it fun to play someone who has magical powers?

Hiddleston: Yes. And then to try and connect the magical powers to something honest and soulful.

Debicki: Something real that comes from your body.

Hiddleston: I think the key is to try and fill the silhouette with something really honest so that the audience goes, Wow, he’s the god of mischief. He’s immortal, but he’s full of very human feelings.

The whole thing has been like a little essay on identity, actually. You say Diana was almost like a lesson in love or openheartedness, and it’s similar in a way. At the end of the show, Loki finally understands that his purpose is to give his own life for his friends and the people he loves. In the end, it was all about love. And finally giving him, I suppose, that peace which you hope everyone gets in life.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Listen to Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast now.

More Great Stories From Vanity Fair