Tom Hiddleston cannot help but gush about the world director Guillermo del Toro created for his new gothic romance film "Crimson Peak."
"I think the first time I walked in (the set) there were already leaves falling through the ceiling, and if you stepped on a particular floor board, this red clay would seep and ooze out from underneath," he told Entertainment Weekly. "It was like magic, truly."
Even though "Crimson Peak" is categorized as a horror film, Hiddleston believes that it is also a love story. According to him, it is about "the explained supernatural - in which the supernatural intrusions are traced back to previous trauma - but it's also about love. Everyone wants a kind of love from the other that they can't return. It's an interesting inverted love story. I hope people connect to it once the nights draw in and summer is over and there are coats raised against the chill, I hope that it will appeal to that aspect of the imagination."
It also helps that the director is very hands-on in developing all of the characters involved in "Crimson Peak." In the film, Hiddleston plays a mysterious aristocrat named Thomas Sharpe who lures aspiring novelist Edith Cushing (played by Mia Wasikowska) to his ancestral home in England.
There, she encounters several ghosts, but no one threatens her more than her sister-in-law Lucille Sharpe (played by Jessica Chastain).
"Guillermo gives all of his actors very, very thorough biographies," shared Hiddleston. "He includes a personal and closely kept secret that neither the character nor the actor should tell anyone else. Thomas Sharpe's secret was to leave Allerdale Hall, the sooner the better. As soon as I walked into the place, this crumbling mansion with fear etched into the wallpaper, the word spelled out - FEAR - it immediately inspires me."
Hiddleston describes his character as both "dashing and mysterious," and the best thing about him is his moral ambiguity.
"I suppose you're not quite sure about him," Hiddleston said. "There is an elegant mystery to him in the first half of the film and very quickly you realize there's more to it."
It might be too late for Edith to realize that the secrets of Edward and Lucille, as well as Allerdale Hall itself might kill her, and Hiddleston tries to examine why this is so.
"Thomas Sharpe is so connected to that house, that's his inheritance in every respect. It's his physical inheritance, it's his emotional and psychological inheritance, it is the thing that is weighing him down and stopping him from escaping into his own future and his own autonomy," he said. "That was such a key to playing the character - he existed in tension between his past and his future."
