JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Our column in BusinessWorld on Friday is about BBC One’s spy drama The Night Manager starring Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, Olivia Colman, Tom Hollander and Elizabeth Debicki. (Tobias Menzies is in the trailer!) Here’s a preview for the Hiddlestoners, who are legion.

Hiddleston is the boyfriend of the Internet, and his every smile and gesture is analyzed and rendered as GIFs on Tumblr. He was an electrifying Coriolanus in the Donmar Warehouse production that was broadcast live in cinemas, and a contemplative Henry V in The Hollow Crown. He has been the handsome, rather diffident foil to the luminous Rachel Weisz in Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea, the fabulous Tilda Swinton in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, and the ferocious Jessica Chastain in Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak.

Hiddleston made the ladies more scintillating through his presence, but in each case his character seemed weak and not in charge of his own destiny. They seemed like iterations of his most-recognized role to date: Loki in Marvel’s Thor and Avengers movies. While technically a villain, Loki is too adorable to fear or hate: he’s a naughty schoolboy rebelling against his parents. Good for Tumblr and writers of fan fiction, but limiting for such an intelligent and gifted actor. He needs a character who is free to be himself, unshackled from the past, who owns his own flaws and bad decisions. Then he will become the star his online legions expect him to be, in the league of Redmayne and Cumberbatch. Will The Night Manager be that role?

Read our column, The Binge.