Photo: BBC
Tom Hiddleston revealed that he “felt very wild,” playing the town pastor in a village that is afraid of a sea creature in Apple’s TV’s The Essex Serpent. The series is inspired by Sarah Perry’s acclaimed book and is set in the Victorian waterfront area of Essex and London.
Will Ransome (Hiddleston) tries to allay the citizens’ fears, saying that the animal is “an invention, a symptom of the times we live in.”
Widow Cora Seabourne (Claire Danes) is visiting the town to investigate reports of serpent attacks and is unloading the remains of the Essex disaster area after the earthquake, making God-fearing villagers realize that something could have happened.
Rumors of a fearsome sea monster are piling up following a report of a missing local girl – believed to be already dead. A few residents speculate about what happened, saying he was “taken for her sins by the Blackwater beast.”
Hiddleston told the BBC the script was “brilliant” and added, “They were about complex people at a complex time, with a conflict of ideas.” He further stated that shooting the series “felt very wild and mirrored the passions of the story we were telling. I was really excited to do it.”
Beasts are not new to Hiddleston, as he experienced “Hulk-smash” as Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films. However, he embraces the apparent unlimited interest in mythological animals amid our need to figure out things that we cannot comprehend.
“Monsters are symbols of mystery … they reflect our need to find meaning in our lives,” he added. “I think human beings need, or are drawn, to externalize mystery. We like to be humbled by forces in nature and in our world that seem to be unexplained.”
Considering it’s “probable we know we don’t know everything,” he believes “we still have so many questions.” But, he continued, “And sometimes those questions coalesce into the shape of monsters, benign and otherwise.”
Will’s understanding is challenged by Cora, who meets him in the swirling coast fog. For the most part, the plot revolves around the tension – intellectual and sexual – between the two.
Although the film’s center may be the serpent, it somehow surrounds Dane’s charming Cora, living alone with her young son following the death of her cruel husband. However, unlike in other TV dramas, Cora does not want a new partner.
“No. Oopsy daisy,” says Danes laughing, evidently amused by her role’s independence. “Her intellectual pursuits are the driving force.”
Cora keeps a precise distance from religion and is passionate about fossils. She is curious about whether the serpent was a dinosaur that survived extinction.
“I think it’s her eagerness to realize herself,” she further states. “Her development had been quite arrested when she married this intensely controlling, abusive man. She’s just so relieved to have a chance to breathe again.”
Cora’s film presentation is a little accurate.
Professor Gowan Dawson of the University of Leicester’s Victorian Studies Center pointed out that a few of the most notable women of that time “who collected and studied fossils did not marry and devoted their lives to their paleontological pursuits.”
“This was the case with both Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, who, despite their very different social backgrounds, worked together in Lyme Regis and made some remarkable discoveries of fossilized sea creatures,” he stated.
