"I thought theater people wouldn't see me if I hadn't trained. I didn't want to just be the Brideshead guy, to spend the rest of my life wearing waistcoats. I got the chance to try everything. Not just Romeos, but pimps and grandfathers and even one role as a woman in a Naomi Wallace play called Slaughter City"
About this Quote
The jab at being "the Brideshead guy" is a surprisingly candid confession about typecasting as a kind of velvet prison. "Wearing waistcoats" stands in for an entire aesthetic category: posh, period, emotionally repressed men in candlelit rooms. It s not an insult to that work so much as an anxiety about being reduced to it, consumed as a brand. His phrasing makes the stereotype feel suffocatingly specific, like a costume that slowly becomes skin.
"I got the chance to try everything" reads like gratitude, but it also signals strategy. Listing "Romeos... pimps and grandfathers" is a résumé disguised as a manifesto: range as self-defense. The kicker - playing a woman in Naomi Wallace s Slaughter City - is a deliberate disruption of the tasteful Hiddleston image. Wallace s work sits in the politically charged, anti-glossy theater tradition; invoking it telegraphs seriousness, risk, and discomfort as credentials.
Underneath the anecdote is a thesis about survival in celebrity acting: you don t just choose roles, you choose what story your career tells about you, and you keep rewriting it before someone else does.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reinvention |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Hiddleston, Tom. (2026, January 16). I thought theater people wouldn't see me if I hadn't trained. I didn't want to just be the Brideshead guy, to spend the rest of my life wearing waistcoats. I got the chance to try everything. Not just Romeos, but pimps and grandfathers and even one role as a woman in a Naomi Wallace play called Slaughter City. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-thought-theater-people-wouldnt-see-me-if-i-131114/
Chicago Style
Hiddleston, Tom. "I thought theater people wouldn't see me if I hadn't trained. I didn't want to just be the Brideshead guy, to spend the rest of my life wearing waistcoats. I got the chance to try everything. Not just Romeos, but pimps and grandfathers and even one role as a woman in a Naomi Wallace play called Slaughter City." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-thought-theater-people-wouldnt-see-me-if-i-131114/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I thought theater people wouldn't see me if I hadn't trained. I didn't want to just be the Brideshead guy, to spend the rest of my life wearing waistcoats. I got the chance to try everything. Not just Romeos, but pimps and grandfathers and even one role as a woman in a Naomi Wallace play called Slaughter City." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-thought-theater-people-wouldnt-see-me-if-i-131114/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2026.


